In Praise of the Grotesque Body: Porous, Playful, and Perishable.
Or, the Opposite of the Machine is the Body
In this series, I’ve offered a critical reading of Paul Kingsnorth’s Tale of the Machine series. In the first post, I discussed the complexity of what he set out to do. It’s even in the blurb of Kingsnorth’s forthcoming book: “how a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human.” I wouldn’t presume to know what everyone feels, but I agree wholeheartedly that the force(s) that shape our lives withstand easy definition. This is why I prefer to follow Thomas Merton in naming this system The Unspeakable. Calling it The Machine does give it a sort of eerie, calculating, and impersonal quality, despite the ways we tend to give an animus, a personal character, to the Unspeakable. I noted how his attempt to define this thing causes a bit of mental whiplash as Kingsnorth gropes for clarity on what precisely this is. He’s trying to lasso an amoeba, or put a fence around a jellyfish. It doesn’t quite work, in my opinion.
In the second post, I noted that many of the concrete aspects of the Machine that he lists are not really any different than how most people describe civilization or empire. I discuss critiques of empire from sociologists and anarchists like James C Scott, and I discuss how, if empire produces its own cosmology or myth, we might look to indigenous cosmologies as alternatives to the cosmology of empire.
The third post explored the genre of apocalypse, focusing on apocalypse as a resource for the oppressed, as a “myth countering myth.” I noted that, in contrast to what Paul Kingsnorth articulates via Lewis Mumford, that one can simply throw off the myth of the machine by walking away from it, imperial myths instead must be countered with alternative myths which invigorate communities of solidarity.
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Paul Kingsnorth devotes a massive amount of writing to the Machine. In his Tale of the Machine series, he writes over 130,000 words swirling around the concept of the Machine, how he believes it operates in our lives, and how he proposes we deal with it. His forthcoming book on the same topic, Against the Machine, clocks in at 368 pages. Yet, largely absent from his rhetorical intifada against the Machine is its opposite: the body. This seems strange for someone who homesteads, and who has edited a book of essays on Wendell Berry, one of the defining authors on the body and its limits. Even in his essay on transhumanism, “Gender, Sex, and the Machine,” which is actually more of a diatribe against transgender people, he doesn’t actually talk about the body that much. He only uses the phrase “the body” three times in the essay. Feelings, which indeed comprise a baseline symphony in the embodied life, are likewise missing from his corpus.
Why is this? Kingsnorth previously engaged wiccanism, which is nothing if not a body-engaging religious practice. Now he identifies as a Christian. Though Christianity is often filtered through a neoplatonic lens privileging soul over the embodied, in reality, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are filled with spit, blood, broken skulls, watery wombs, cut penises, atrophied and paralyzed limbs, menstruation, and yes, semen. The Christian sacraments are embodied practices: the eating of the Eucharist (“this is my body,” “this is my blood”), the baptism of the believer’s body into water. Even the resurrection body of Jesus is not some pristine divine form, it is a body so traumatized by crucifixion that his closest friends do not recognize him.1
So it strikes me as strange that Kingsnorth does not do more to highlight the body in relation to and in opposition with the machine.
If a machine is a nonliving assemblage of minerals designed to carry out a specific task or purpose, a body is the precise opposite. A body is not built, it is born and grown from prior living flesh.
A machine is an archetype of order. Its angles and gears must fit perfectly, or it is defective. If it leaks, it must be fixed. An ideal machine is shiny, quiet, and perfectly fitted for the task of its user. The opposite of a machine is a body. Even a healthy, attractive body is awkward. A body always leaks: sweat, urine, saliva, feces, mucus. Even the ideal body will, if it survives long enough, sag, wrinkle, and stoop. A body smells. A body gets hungry, tired, weak. Any body can be characterized, at one time or another, as grotesque.
Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin analyzed the role of the grotesque body as a part of his larger theory of medieval carnival. For him, the carnivalesque operates as a form of hierarchy-demolishing cultural technology. The body in all its splendor and grotesque functions plays a central role in this, as he explains:
The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world... This is why the essential role belongs to those parts of the grotesque body in which it outgrows its own self, transgressing its own body, in which it conceives a new, second body: the bowels and the phallus. These two areas play the leading role in the grotesque image, and it is precisely for this reason that they are predominantly subject to positive exaggeration, to hyperbolization; they can even detach themselves from the body and lead an independent life, for they hide the rest of the body, as something secondary (The nose can also in a way detach itself from the body.) Next to the bowels and the genital organs is the mouth, through which enters the world to be swallowed up. And next is the anus. All these convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation. This is why the main events in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body-all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all these events the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven.2
For Bakhtin, the grotesque body symbolizes something cosmic, bodily, and social, in a triune whole. This grotesque body becomes a metaphor for death and renewal, both on the individual and societal level. The late, great anthropologist, David Graeber, takes Bakhtin’s analysis even further. He theorizes a continuum of social relations, which range from, on the one end, what he calls joking relations, to the other extreme, constituted by avoidance relations. Joking relations denotes the interactions between equals. They joke and kid, poke fun, and are more comfortable with bodily functions around each other. Amongst joking partners, the body and its functions symbolize the porousness of their relationship. They eat together, and in doing so, the mouth opens the body to the world. They perhaps fart in the other's presence, indicating a continuity between the body and the world around them, and in doing so, recognize each other as part of that constitutive environment in which they give and take of their animal being. The back and forth of joking and humor is a sign of the porosity of their social relations. In many cultures, it is not just what comes out of the body that indicates social relations; just as important is the question of who may eat together. If you come to my family’s house, you will be treated as an equal, as a guest at our table. You will, likewise, find that burps are a hilarious side effect of eating, farts are funny, and all bodies are equal and equally grotesque, glorious, and beautiful.
Avoidance relations, on the other hand, represent the opposite kind of social interaction. Graeber gives the example that if he had an audience with the queen, he would never pick his nose, or belch, or fart in her presence. To do so would be the highest form of rudeness. Graeber’s thesis is that this kind of deference of behavior betrays a social hierarchy. The queen and her subjects do not inhabit the same world. One way of indicating the way the queen or aristocrat is set off from the normal world is for them to avoid any sort of bodily function which serves to remind of animality or porosity. Hence the lord or lady may never fart, belch, defecate, or urinate, and likewise the subject must refrain from these acts in their presence. To do otherwise would breach the social class barrier which avoidance behavior maintains.
So one can see how Bakhtin’s analysis of the grotesque fits neatly with this observation of social manners. Graeber sums up the difference this way:
The body in the domain of joking, one might say, is constituted mainly of substances—stuff flowing in or flowing out. The same could hardly be true of the body in the domain of avoidance, which is set apart from the world. To a very large extent, the physical body itself is negated, the person translated into some higher or more abstract level. In fact, I would argue that while joking bodies are necessarily apiece with the world (one is almost tempted to say “nature”) and made up from the same sort of materials, the body in avoidance is constructed out of something completely different.3
Much like Kingsnorth, following Lewis Mumford, uses the Machine as a mythic way of describing something both within us, and as an external force, so too can the body be a symbol, a myth-countering myth. The myth of the machine is opposed to life, making the body simply a devoid object, able to be replaced with another body, and just another gear in the social machinery of the pyramid of the megamachine. The rebuttal of the myth of the body is that earth matters, and thus the body matters. Meaning is not wedged into the material substance of the earth or its bodies like a sausage into its casing, but rather erupts from the very stuff of the world, the same fabric of life that includes that awkward list of bodily substances so prevalent even in the holy Scriptures: blood, tears, mucus, urine, semen, and more.
So the grotesque is animal and earthy, but also, in its carnivalesque echoes, festive and utopian. I want to reclaim the grotesque body. I want to recover the bawdy bodies of the carnivalesque, because our culture needs a somatic reminder of the individual’s own continuity with the trajectory of humanity, but also our porosity in relation to the rest of the cosmos.
In so doing, I highlight three ways that the grotesque body offers a counterpart to the Machine. First, the grotesque body is porous and metabolic. Machines can have parts replaced, but are otherwise unchanging except by the weathering of time. Second, grotesque bodies, including human animals, engage in play, and machines certainly do not play because they are rule-bound. Finally, in the ultimate anti-machine act, the grotesque body dies.
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As a healthcare provider, I am no stranger to the grotesque body. So often, the kind of medicine I practice in an urgent care setting has to do with wounds. Sharp edges open the body, and blood trickles or pours out. At other times, an infection brews under the skin, and the cure is a cut, a lancing of the abscess in order to make an exit for the pus. The skin, that organ of boundary, is not a wall, but rather an active gate. The life of the grotesque body is porous.
Living bodies metabolize, which is to say, they exist in a constant state of breakdown and repair. Nutrients must constantly be taken in so that the repair can happen, and the detritus must constantly be shuttled out. Eating, drinking and inhaling take in the nutrients, while exhaling, defecating, and urinating are how animal bodies have managed this dynamic process. The word itself, metabolic, means to turn over, and the rate of metabolism offers a way to think about how quickly a given body changes the molecules by which it is constituted at any given moment. Metabolism is a key facet of life, and a crucial distinction between the body and the machine. For machines do not metabolize. Yes, a machine might use energy: an automobile burns fuel, but this energy is directed simply at moving the vehicle, not constantly replacing the molecules of the car with metabolic turnover. A solar array might capture sunlight and convert it to electricity, but it does not photosynthesize sunlight and turn it into carbohydrates with which to build its body.
This porosity of the body, with molecules constantly fed in and swiftly flowing out, relates to the grotesqueness of the body.4 It is the very process of metabolism with the organs which promote the intake and expulsion of substances that serves as an image of the grotesque. Where metabolism and its organs focus on sustaining the continuity of the body in spite of and by means of its porosity, sexuality represents a further grotesqueness of the body. Here, the body becomes even more porous in service of new life. And even where new life does not occur, the intimacy of this porosity represents the possibility for humans to engage with each other with embodied tenderness. Sex is both cosmic, representing all humankind, but also earthy, completely connected to the physicality of two loving bodies. Bakhtin says it this way:
It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people. As such it is opposed to severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and the body. We repeat: the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people's character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed.5
Person and society are not separate, from this perspective. The personal is political, because the social corpus grows out of, and respectively operates onto, the political bodies of its constituents. So the porosity of the atomized body becomes synecdoche for the porosity of the body politic of a people.
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Bodies play, whereas machines cannot and do not. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson understood play as a process in which relationships become negotiated and (tentatively) established. Dog pups play more because they navigate the world with less experience, and thus must inaugurate relationships between themselves and their siblings and parents, but also themselves and the ball or stick or grasshopper. The same process is true of young animals of nearly all higher order species. A machine can play a game, which has fixed rules and can be programmed, but a machine or computer does not play in the same way living creatures do in order to try on and then produce rules of interaction. Graeber talks about play similarly to Bateson as intrinsically prior to rules:
In fact, if it were possible to come up with a workable definition of “play” (this is notoriously difficult) it would have to be something along these lines: play can be said to be present when the free expression of creative energies becomes an end in itself. It is freedom for its own sake. But this also makes play in a certain sense a higher-level concept than games: play can create games, it can generate rules—in fact, it inevitably does produce at least tacit ones, since sheer random playing around soon becomes boring— but therefore by definition play cannot itself be intrinsically rulebound. This is all the more true when play becomes social. Studies of children’s play, for example, inevitably discover that children playing imaginary games spend at least as much time arguing about the rules than they do actually playing them. Such arguments become a form of play in themselves.6
Play, Graeber notes, lies in the domain of sovereignty. In order to create rules, one must operate in a sense outside the bounds of play. So God created a cosmos and moral system, the argument goes, but is not bound by the same rules as the cosmos he created. The logic of kingship is similar by analogy: the sovereign king cannot be accountable to the same laws as his subjects.
Playing bodies are thus in a sense a threat to hierarchy, because bodies at play operate outside established rules, or, at the least, are in the process of establishing their own rules. This inherent subversive element within play is seen especially in what we might call the carnivalesque. Bakhtin, referenced earlier with the idea of the grotesque body, also reviewed medieval carnival feasts and draws out from them what he calls a carnival sense of the world. For Bakhtin, carnival is first and foremost a way of being in the world, into which all are invited during the feast time:
Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalistic life. Because carnivalistic life is life drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent "life turned inside out," "the reverse side of the world" ("monde a l'envers").7
Bakhtin identifies four principles of this carnival sense of the world. First, distance is suspended–people interact freely and familiarly without regard to customary social norms that creates barriers to the intermingling of people based on culture. Closely linked to this demolishing of social norms is the eccentricity present in the carnivalesque. From the vantage of normal life, carnival behavior is outlandish and inappropriate, as it experiments with “latent sides of human nature” in expression and action. This suspension of distance and eccentricity ultimately reveals itself in the third principle, in what Bakhtin calls carnivalistic mesalliances, where hierarchy and symbolic separation are demolished: “All things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic hierarchical worldview are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations. Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.” Carnivalesque pageantry thus reveals the final principle identified by Bakhtin, profanation: “carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings, etc.” Hence, the carnival king is coronated and decrowned. “Priests” of carnival ride through the pageantry throwing cow dung or baptizing people in urine. These eccentric and profane acts playfully deconstructed the hierarchical medieval worldview by bringing the grotesqueness of the body into the realm of the sacred and divine. This play with sacred order order, as Bakhtin emphasizes, counters the official transcript of the accepted laws of political and religious structure:
As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.8
So the playing body offers a critique to hierarchical relations, and established order. This is a critical place where I have disagreement with Kingsnorth. Like Kingsnorth and Mumford, I see the pyramids as a sort of mythical symbol of the machine. The pyramid itself is not a machine of course, but its building does represent a kind of hierarchy and social machinery, where people become replaceable cogs of an apparatus. I oppose this use of human bodies for elite ends. I oppose the pyramidalization of society, where there are powerful elites at the top strata, buttressed by the constant gleaning of wealth from the work of people below them. But Kingsnorth seems rather ambivalent about hierarchy actually. On the one hand, he does list hierarchy as a core characteristic of the Machine. On the other hand, however, he lists progress “against tradition, hierarchy, dogma, rules, etc.,” as a feature of what he calls Machine religion. So it’s unclear whether he is okay with social hierarchies, with the elitism contained with hierarchical structure, or he just doesn’t like when elites have different ideas about how society should function than he has. Similarly, he locates the rejection of monarchy as one of the historical trajectories which has propelled the Machine:
A monarchy is, after all, an offence against modernity. It is a hangup from an earlier, more organic age, which at its worst is a trapdoor to a particular type of tyranny (our new king’s ancestral namesake ended up with his head in a basket on this charge) but at its best is a bulwark against another: the money-power of the Machine. A monarchy is irrational, uncommercial and inexplicably mystical. It embodies tradition passed down through time. As such, it is deeply ‘unrepresentative’ according to the current, constipated definition of that word, and yet it manages somehow to represent the country better than any elected politician, celebrity, pundit or philosopher ever could.
What, after all, is the point of a monarch in the modern world? There is really only one: to represent a country and its history; to be a living embodiment of the spirit of a people. As such, the throne represents to its critics more than some putative offence against ‘democracy’: it stands for something whose very existence is increasingly contentious in its meaning, form and direction: the nation itself.
It is a strange and specious argument, because he seems to have convinced himself that because monarchy is an offence to modernity this must mean it is good. Because it is irrational, it must be inherently anti-machine. And most wild is his idea that a monarchy is a bulwark against “the money power of the machine.” The East India Trading Company, which was once the largest corporation in the world, was formed under the express blessing of the monarch Queen Elizabeth I, and the crown shared in profits from the company’s exploits. The royal family, like all billionaires, participates in the wealth accumulation of capitalism like a vampire squid.
Kingsnorth’s argument puts him in the same sort of ideological orbit as the American neo-monarchist, Curtis Yarvin, whose ideas sound quite similar:
If you are a (cultural) conservative, liberalism is your enemy. The oligarchy is your enemy. The oligarchy may be rotting, but it will not clean itself up. Support monarchy as the radical cure for the liberal oligarchy of all fancy institutions.
If you are a (cultural) fascist, monarchy is the closest thing to your kind of fascism that is maybe possible today. It’s not fascism. But it’s still pretty based. Support monarchy as the only realistic cure for the old liberal-conservative monopoly of power.
Monarchy is for everyone, you see. Basically, salus populi suprema lex means everyone is a protected class. The purpose of the government is to nurture and protect its human beings, all of them.
Yarvin’s argument is exactly what Graeber described earlier as the domain of sovereigns and the divine: one must have the monarch, because law requires administration by someone whose own actions are outside of the game, not subjected to its rules.
In a comment thread, Kingsnorth responds to whether he is himself a monarchist:
Though monarchy vs republic is a bit of a toss-up in reality. I don't see that either system has consistently porven [sic] better or worse. In the case of my country though, the symbolism and continuity is undeniable. And, I have come to believe, beneficial.
So as best I can tell, Kingsnorth is fairly ambivalent about monarchy, and general hierarchy, as long as it is rooted in tradition. And for him, this is the root of the problem. Kingsnorth seems to trace most problems, whether they fall under the rubric of The Machine or not, to loss of traditional society.
So Kingsnorth cannot really tolerate play, those bawdy bodies of carnival. And I think this relates to another area where I disagree with him. Because for Kingsnorth, it seems, tradition, whether it carries with it significant repression of some bodies is better than no tradition. Kingsnorth seems to have a sort of Lord-of-the-Flies view of humanity, which requires strong tradition (or perhaps even a strong monarch) in order to prevent violent excesses of human behavior. But real life children, and even adults, are just as likely to cooperate than to resort to violent conflict. This is, as we have discussed, why children play, to establish relationships with each other. In an actual deserted island scenario, which played out with six Tongan boys in 1965, the boys were found by an Australian lobster fisher after having been stranded for 15 months. Their story was not one of descent into violence and murder, though. The boys divided labor, created a garden, captured rainwater, and even healed one’s broken leg. They had their disagreements, of course, but found ways to air and clear grievances.
Tradition creates order. It gamifies an area of life, in the sense in which Graeber describes a game as rule bounded rather than the free creativity of play. And this is of course not always bad. But tradition can get stuffy, and at worst, lead to really terrible circumstances in the interest of order. At its best, carnivalesque play points out the grotesqueness and porousness of all bodies and profanes all that is considered separate, so that people can freshly work out how to embody life together more wholly.
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I recently had an experience that reminded me of the fragility of life. My son, Tegan, who just turned two, began having fevers. This is, of course, rather common, especially for a two year old who goes to daycare. But his fevers would get pretty high, and often, quite suddenly. One morning as I was watching him, he went from being the active, playful, and somewhat stubborn two year old he often is, to becoming flushed, and sluggish. He was obviously developing a fever so I gave him an antipyretic and sat down to play with him in my arms. I was talking with his aunt, when suddenly, his neck jerked upward and his eyes rolled back. His body stiffened, and I held him upright as he began to make choking sounds. For a few seconds, his face became ashen and his lips turned blue.
“Breathe,” I said. “You can do this. Breathe, Tegan, breath.”
I knew that febrile seizures are generally not life-threatening, but I felt so scared. The words of Francis Weller, a grief counselor, flashed through my head: everything you love you will lose. And I was so scared I would lose him. I told my sister-in-law to dial 911. It stereotypically felt like an eternity, but after a few seconds the color returned to his face. Tegan cried, and I knew he was okay.
Ultimately, the grotesque body is also a perishable body. Machines can have parts endlessly replaced as they break down, but a machine does not die, precisely because, as discussed earlier, a machine does not metabolize.
This perishable nature of the body, which can and does become ill, also highlights what is often called care work, that is, the labor of tending to the grotesque body, which is work that has for so long resisted mechanization.
If a normal body is–at least at times–repulsive, a sick body only amplifies the grotesqueness.
Disease amplifies the porosity of the body, which when well is still able to maintain a boundary of sorts. The body in the grip of illness can no longer keep up any borders. Skin sloughs. Purulent fluid weeps from eyes. Wounds open, making porous what was thought to be bounded by skin. Mouths emit vomit, discharging rather than consuming in an unsettling reversal of body norms. The anus becomes unable even temporarily to hold back excrement. No perfume can mask the odor.
This grotesque body, especially the sick body, requires care. And here is an area of work that machines are quite clearly unable to do well. I will admit that medical technology is quite advanced–one can find a machine to filter or pump blood, acting similarly to a body organ. But this is not the same as the work of care. Machines cannot sponge bathe an aged body near the end of life. I have not yet found a machine that can change my toddler’s diaper. This is not entirely the domain of humans, of course. Many animals can and do engage in care work for their offspring, mate, or other members of their kind, and occasionally for those different from them. But human hands are uniquely able to offer the work of care. Perhaps this is why one can find petroglyphs and pictographs of human hands from very long ago all across the globe.
Sick bodies are particularly grotesque, and often require careful, tedious work. This relates to Graeber’s analysis of avoidance and joking, because often, people who do care work are of socially lower status. In patriarchal systems, it is often women who do the bulk of care work, whether that is changing a diaper or bathing an elder. Often, wealthy families employ someone (not of their own social class) in order to help rear their children. The most menial caregiving tasks generally are performed by people with less privilege or social power–recent immigrants, or politically marginal groups.
Despite the way care work highlights socioeconomic factors, still tenderness represents a way of interacting central to the experience of being human. Tenderness toward others offers a core anti-machine ethic. The ethic of tenderness is separate from care work. As discussed above, care work sometimes can reify hierarchical relations. For care work to truly be tenderness, it must contain within it the possibility of reciprocity. As I mentioned earlier, the tenderness of sexuality is itself a cosmic act. But tenderness need not be sexualized to still be embodied, egalitarian, and full of care.
Ultimately, the sick body prefigures the perishing body. Where the sick body with its grotesque porosity might yet become whole and maintain its (leaky) boundaries, the perishing body lets go of its integrity and yields to dispersal. The dead body allows itself to become swallowed up and metabolized by the world.
So there lies with death a contradiction. On the one hand, the perishing body is a gift to the world. This is the sense which Bakhtin describes as a pregnant death–the past gives birth to the present, the earth swallows up and makes a cornucopia of the aging and infirm. On the other hand, living organisms–all bodies–operate under the same fundamental impulse: keep living! This impulse is denied with death.
But by being metabolized, the individual lets go of its own self and joins the cosmic body, the people, who are constantly renewed as the carnival continues. So there is gift in decay; there is life in rot.
Recently, my partner found a bone in a ditch. It was a deer vertebrae, with rodent tooth marks declaring, unmistakably, that even in death we contribute to the life of other pulsing bodies. Death is not absence from the carnival of life.
Because organic bodies have the possibility of dying, they also have the possibility of meaning. This can be seen in the simplest way with the simplest of organisms. A mobile microbe will proceed toward chemical gradients of nourishment, whether that is essential sugars or minerals, and will migrate away from toxic substances, like strong acids. The impulse to live makes the external environment meaningful, even if that meaning is as simple as yuck or yum.
Meaning is thus relational–bound up with the interactions between the individual and its surroundings. This again highlights the other two principles I described above. Porosity examines how we maintain our unique identity (boundary) while still taking in the world and being swallowed up by it. Playfulness consists of interacting with the world and establishing relationships of meaning, especially with humans and creatures who have similar creative agency.
Despite the sense of inevitability and even of apocalypse that the machinery of capitalism and the pyramidalization of society precipitates, we know, of course, that life is fecund and formidable in the face of opposition. We also know that machines, too, can be metabolized. This is important to recognize. Lithotrophic microorganisms eat minerals and metal. So there is a bit of hope present in the overly mechanized world. It too will be consumed. This pantheon of lithotrophic organisms snacks on stone, crunching iron, drinking nitrite, spits ammonia, and munches other minerals in a ruckus of rock-eating. All our iron rumblings and screaming machines and glistening screens will one day be their fodder. The Machine can and will be eaten and thus be encompassed in the same carnival of life that it opposes.
I know of no better way to end than to sing a love song to the grotesque body.
After all, your body is, itself, in so many ways, grotesque. Nose constantly growing. Hair sprouting everywhere. So many organs jostling. Your body is a porous border made not by its edge but by its insistence on persisting. You leak atoms everywhere, slough dead cells like old lovers, shed metabolic by-products like bad habits in a new year. The you at the center of your body is the eye of a hurricane, a center around which energy flows rather than a boundary wall of i and thou. You, a protrusion from the gnarled face of the world. An outgrowth of the body politic. You are a gathering of water, a seasonal spring defined by its undulating edge. A transient bag of fluid. The you of today was yesterday’s storm and is tomorrow's ocean. You are the birth of the pregnant womb of the past. You gestate with death and the hope of tomorrow. You, a grotesque body, a momentary assemblage, a carnival of miraculous molecules.
See the work of theologian Ched Myers for more on this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.cloversites.com/f3/f360fdc4-74d7-4b81-8ad6-e086ef44528c/documents/Apr_19_BCM_E_news.pdf
Rabelais And His World, 317.
Graeber, Possibilities, 20.
It is beyond the scope of this essay, but interesting to note how often in medieval iconography Christ on the cross has a porous body. Beyond nails puncturing hands, and crown of thorns piercing the scalp, there is the volvna, the wound in the side, often illustrated in a way that appears similar to a vulva. Often in this iconography, the Christ figure also has a belly which appears vaguely, but clearly intentionally, phallic. The imagery is clearly carnivalesque.
Rabelais, 19.
Utopia of Rules, 108.
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 122.
Rabelais, 10.