Body as Technology
Quill Christie-Peters in a posting at Tea and Bannock posits a decolonizing relationship with the body that taps into connection with ancestors. She likens the body to a technology.
My body, you have always been the ceremony to transform pain into creation, the gathering place of all our ancestors and spirit kin. My body. Our oldest Anishinaabeg technology. My body. Our oldest Anishinaabeg technology.This may at first sound odd if one doesn't buy into Indigenous spirituality. But place it against this bit from Steven Shapiro about the discourses of the sexed body (he is contrasting Delany with Bataille).
https://teaandbannock.com/2018/04/28/decolonial-love-letters-to-our-bodies-gwen-benaway-and-quill-christie-peters/
For Delany, in contrast, sexual extremity is conceived not as a rupturing of the self, but as its continual metamorphosis — or better (to use a word from Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler) as its transindividuation, its becoming-with-others. For Delany, sex is a continual, and never-to-be-concluded, exploration of the intensities and extensities of the flesh. Sexual acts involve a whole range and series of bodily pleasures, and an activation of the body's previously unknown potentialities. These actions, and the potentialities they unleash, connect people more intensely to one another, and to the world as a whole. Far from involving a shattering of the ego, these actions help to define, and also to change, the contours of an evanescent "self" that does not pre-exist them: a self that has certain persisting efforts and obsessions, to be sure, but that is also open to the warmth and openness of contact with others, as well as to the vagaries of time and chance and Muddle.The space of the ancestors in decolonial theory might be likened to a "preindividuated milieu". But this is but a beginning.
Steven Shaviro
"Ars Vitae: Delany's Philosophical Fable"
Essay appended to Phallos by Samuel R. Delany
And so for day 2280
11.03.2013
