The body as connections

what we live as a body

When you can’t breathe, this creates a specific kind of connection to the body. To even speak of connection is to assume too much, as though there was disconnection that is then overcome. When you can’t breathe because of your body, as in asthma for example, or more generally when in respiratory distress, the specific intensity of the body has a hue or colour to it that is not the same as when drowning, or being choked. Drowning is blue. Choking is red. Respiratory distress is purple.

These colours might be arbitrary and incorrect or have little resonance, but they point to something more than shades of a single body experience, more than a spectrum, something closer to a population. When you can’t breathe, the mode in which you cannot breathe creates a specific kind of connection to the body.

Connection is often taken as a positive. Being connected with my body. This is a sign of health, disconnection a sign of alienation. To be stuck in one’s head, as though the phrase had to be this way, to be stuck.

And yet as soon as that body is confined, constrained, the capacity to be free in one’s own mind arises as solace.

What if the body was not something to be connected to, but was rather the connections themselves? As though, at a certain threshold, the increase in connecting forces, in overlapping and interacting dynamics, produced a body, or whatever it is that we live as a body. The population of forces can produce bodies like crowd features in a city, or cloud features amongst the fields. One of the ways of re-connecting - or-organising might be better - is to move from a city body to a festival body. Moving through the fields, even amongst a crowd, has a different feeling to the fleshly flow of the rush hour commute. Each instance perhaps a distinct body, each atmosphere of feelings enabling a specific formation of movement, thought and sensation.

A radical pluralism of the body.

We are always legion.

Population.

Crowd.

Even if we were to assume such, however, what difference might it make? Well, if the body formation is the condition of reality of thought, if we can only think within some specific kinds of body formation, some particular modes or atmospheres, then the body becomes something closer to the productive forces of the system of subjectivity. This would also be consistent with there being no need for a connection to the body, because any subject position is already the result of a body formation.

Change the body, change the mind. Necessarily.