BodyParts

Mathew Arthur

BodyParts

Contents

Preface 1Body parts 3Bodying practice 6Path-ology of the body 8 ISBN13 9781671994232

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First edition: November 2019

Cover: Hoppe and Auerbach, Human body 132, Svensk-tysk ordbok, 1919

Type: Road Rage by Youssef Habchiand Inter by Rasmus Andersson

Preface

I spent the first months of my life in an incubator, a plastic womb made with chemicals sucked from subterranean rot. My vulnerability demanded more than its share of world: oil riggers, rare earth metals, assembly line workers, technicians, nurses, time, care, and sprawling media of exchange like wires, highways, or pipelines. I was born on stolen Syilx territory, Indigenous lands crosscut by the Ameri-can-Canadian border, in a city the missionaries called Bay of Sand. Before conquest, spirit didn’t discriminate. It coursed through the bodies of human, bear, sockeye, bitterroot, and berry. It sewed everyone together. Everything was a person. Then, residential schools. A slow genocide. And after all the violence, person was jilted by whose version of body won out. The body we mainstreamed quaran-tined itself from land. It evacuated spirit in favour of invisible forces that might secure projects of mastery. X-rays and magnetic signals drafted and claimed the body’s edges and interior borders. We went molecular and made the body’s operating system proprietary. We hardwired potential to establishment science and minor philosophies of affect and new materialism. But the bodies we talked over aren’t gone. We might listen them back into settler worlds and admit the responsibilities they

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Body parts

Anatomy can’t shake authority. Why? Because body parts are shot through with sovereignty. It isn’t merely the estate of political and legal theory or brute geopolitics, but of everything that’s been made impenetrable. Whether nation, body, organ, or gene, impenetrabilities are parts that need assembling by a powerful someone, somewhere Latour 2016. When what makes up a world is made to nest evenly, power gets scalar: evidence-based governance goes all the way from the minutiae of what composes bodies to satellites orbiting the planet to the cosmos. Sovereignty isn’t just about wrangling borders in the abstract, it edges in on what a body is and can do. Sovereignty is compositional. And matter itself is its medium—the frontier of colonialism where earth processes are discovered or extracted, named, and put to work in a network of parts Papadopoulos 2018. As ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ/Niitsitapi theorists Leroy Little Bear and Ryan Heavy Head write, Western knowledge practices are anatomic at base, targeting the “con-sistent composition and behaviour of solids within solids” 2004. But there are other ways to move with matter and otherwise bodies and worlds that might be built in anecdotal, syncretic, ceremonial, and other registers of practice that hatch forms of anti-colonial resistance.

provoke. For Syilx, the body is capacious. It gathers up capacities as myriad non/human forms and spills over with spirit Armstrong 2010. To be person is simply to take a shape and exceed it. As salmon do. The weathered boulders and freshwater molluscs have always been my teachers. Even when I prac-ticed personhood at their expense. All it takes is letting up on our jurisdiction of bodies. To let this bad body we have—what scaffolds it—slip through open palms like falling sand, each grain another body. To accept responsibility for our uneven share. To make restitution by surrendering our names for Earth-forces and acknowledging the violence that upholds them.

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Oncorhynchus nerka, US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2001

and settler nationalisms (see Ahmed 2000, 98. Bodies get caught between more than one take on sovereignty, more than one way of storytelling territories of Earth into dis/harmony.

As non-Indigenous academics asymmetrically implicated in colonial projects, how do we grasp at a world of flux while remaining accountable for the violence wrought by anatomic sovereignty? How do we admit our ongoing gain from structures, mobili-ties, affiliations, statuses, and cures scaffolded on parts? I offer “body parts” as a generative shorthand for “staying with the trouble” Haraway 2016 of how bodies and bodies of knowledge are co-made in opinionated and noninnocent ways that harm some bodies/knowledges and prop up others. To stick with parts is to refuse the too easy disavowal of colonial sovereignties of subject, place, and thought that have already atomized the world into zones of man-agement. Keeping parts around rejects theory utopias predicated on the body’s supposed unruli-ness in abstractions of process, vitalism, or relation. Don’t forget: the body is already unevenly con-scripted. Rules are suffered differently. To hold bodies and parts together is to jointly acknowledge the way things have been made to be while dreaming into the partial: that bodies and worlds are unfin-

I am not a nation-state — Leanne Simpson

Why sovereignty, when there are a billion newer, better analytics of power? Because where I live, sovereignty is a reclamation. Its otherwise is palpable. Writing from Vancouver’s public research university on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm/Musqueam territory, ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ/Cherokee theorist Daniel Heath Justice describes sovereignty as relational entanglements in which humans and other animal people, plant people, spirit-beings, and elemental forces make nations together in processes of maintaining balance between heterogeneous peoples and their realities 2016. Stories and the relations they impli-cate—teller, hearer, space of exchange, language, genre—are a method of calibrating multispecies and multimaterial togetherness in a place by tuning in to what Earth needs Simpson 2011; 2014. In the always-aftermath of colonialism, territory is simulta-neously scored over by what borders come with Western intellectual and political institutions and resurges as borderless weaves of relation. Story is simultaneously an ancestral mode of diplomacy and a mundane tactic of making and maintaining imperial

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to the exclusion of bodies/knowledges not likewise beholden to the classificatory habits of this or that committee, bylaw, textbook, app, deal, or fad. It’s not just bureaucracies that sort and troubleshoot; what can be called upon as useful is also embodied in a “flow of mundane tasks” Bowker & Star 1999, 2. How we do bodies is by now a dull self-strengthening of authority: adjudicating degrees of urgency and orders of treatment by deferring to the experts, trusting what etiologies and cures the algorithm spits back. At worst, bodies/knowledges are a sly eugenics. Those things and ideas allowed to matter continue to. But administering the body and its after-life in ideas gets at what’s been institutionalized by repetition, not destiny Law 2015.

Even as the body sediments that which authorizes its anatomy (nations, campuses, companies, profes-sionals, celebrities, disciplines, canons, footnotes, habits) it manifests “tensions between sources of knowledge and styles of knowing” Mol 2002, 1. The body is too locally enacted to be derived from anatomical treatises or peer review. Its motley chain of authorizations shakes up the politics of attribu-tion. There’s a lot going on: cadavers, focus groups, fit models, beauty standards, publishing outputs, careerism, medical racism, pop diets, fitness trends, alternatives. But no singular body to angle around.

ished business, that we are differently interested and invested, that histories of practice enable us incongruously Haraway 1988. Anatomy’s symmetry is a ruse. At the same time parts as par-tialities might be a way into writing with a body that hasn’t quiet arrived. To activate alterpotentials. To give a hunch some shape without lending weight to theories of everything. To work at “attention and riffing” Berlant & Stewart 2019 in intensifying sovereignty’s otherwise.

Bodying practice

My body is made in parts: an inheritance of property, with its gatekept parcels, partisan kinship-owner-ship schemes, and inbuilt racisms (see Bhandar 2018. Being done in parts is owed to a pedagogy of always pointing at what differs with an eye toward enslavement, assimilation, or at least management, where what localizes and names an emergent pain point is mainstreamed by getting things back to a “normal” of its own choosing. By always putting difference to work. Subscribing it to some machine. Exacting one’s own alleviation (or career) at the expense of others requires edges, honing the inter-face between subjectivities and regulatory regimes

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No stable body to theorize from. No best or sustain-able practice. We don’t know yet what the body can do Spinoza 1677, E3.P2S. How bodies can be done. But there’s a catch: the power to affect and be affected is always conditioned Massumi 2015, 208. It’s from already in/capacitated bodies/knowl-edges, from histories of practice, that we approach the vicissitudes of matter as makers and practicers of theory.

Path-ology of the body

Neuroscientific terms of “evidence and verification” undercut the body’s power to affect Papoulias & Callard 2010. Power camouflages itself as questions of biology, blurring out conditions of political agency Bollmer 2014. But it isn’t enough to depathologize bodies/knowledges rendered incapable by science, as if everyone uniformly evades the fallout from hot swapping in a better body, a better science, then we’re done. I propose path-ology instead: keeping up with how bodies ongoingly arrive. Following a path is never disinterested. As Sara Ahmed 2013; 2017 discerns, it requires double enabling: bodies carve out the paths they follow, paths move and shape bodies. Material-citational patternings reproduce sorting techniques. They baseline some bodies/8

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skills produced a “lock in” whereby the Qwerty keyboard layout (often held to be less efficient than, say, Dvorak) became the reigning configuration. Not because it was better, simply because it was being used. Because people were up for it, trained onto it, hungry for the new David 1985. As my own fingers hit keys, I’m reproducing what’s been made standard in Qwerty: not just an alphabet grid, but an entire world of technical and industrial standards, regula-tory frameworks, trade laws, lobbying maneuvers, managerial tacks, and productivity strategies. All, impinging on bodies. Through repetition, my hitting this key or that, Qwerty is making-standard a body that types. Proof? My academic output is one long repetitive strain injury. In this way, path dependence cues bodying practices without forgetting what is at stake in uptake: exclusion. What’s being standard-ized and excluded when we all jump on the same books, archives, gear, and methods? Even settler counterpractices that centre indigeneity, blackness, transness, or disability in search of the nonsovereign risk outperforming other otherwises. When they do, they’ve usually got the whole institution in tow: funding blocs, tenure tracks, publishing cartels. Or they don’t—only some bodies have the luxury of pretending away their parts. It’s tricky.

knowledges as core to life ways and ways of knowing and drop others. Too many unlikes and paths or bodies are unfollowed, cancelled. Put another way: the citational is material, the material is citational. It’s more than a calculus of footnotes. Quotas won’t work

because practices are too messy. Just by way of writing something out, even before I plug this canon, that expert, some inter/discipline, I become the standard bearer of a body grammar. During the 80s, bureaucratic investments in touch-typing

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Marcin Wichary, Apple II Computer on display at the Museum Of The Moving Image, New York, 2007.

Berlant, Lauren and Kathleen Stewart. The Hundreds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Bollmer, Grant. “Pathologies of Affect.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 2 2014 298326.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

David, Paul. “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.” The American Economic Review 75, no. 2 1985 332337.

Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 1988 575599.

———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Justice, Daniel Heath. “‘Go Away, Water!’ Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative.” In Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures, edited by Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016.

Latour, Bruno. “Onus Orbis Terrarum: About a Possible Shift in the Definition of Sovereignty.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44, no. 3 2016 305320.

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