Of absent body | profile

“In the course of the classical age there was a comprehensive discovery of the body as an object and target of power (…) the body that is manipulated, that is shaped, that is educated, that obeys, that responds, that is skillful or whose powers are multiplied,” wrote Michel Foucault Monitor and punish before my grandmother (more inclined to read something like Written on the Body than philosophy) screamed, “Not with a gentle little body!” When I saw myself going out in a catsuit as a teenager, I added, “There are satyrs.” Satyrs. What a superior word for degenerate, pervert, stingy, pedophile, abusive or wanker who are talked to about more or less the same things as them. If she had lived during this time, she would have been an excellent tradeswoman. He would have been full of twine when stuffing, making pastry cream, and destroying Bendi hives and lemon tree ants with eco-friendly tricks. But without followers, subscribers or likes, she lived off her husband’s wallet and the minimal community that makes up a family. Today the word “body” is more modern than in his time and that of Foucault, when the panopticon referred to control in concrete prisons and not to that of media and networks. In Argentina, different words are used to describe its influence in public discussion, such as “hegemonic”, “fit”, “mine”, “dissident”, “brown” or “jovial feminine body”.

“Latin America and the Caribbean continue to be shaped by a regime that has shaped and shaped our societies, our politics, our territories, bodies, imaginations and ecosystems,” explains sociologist Emiliano Terán Mantovani in a text on extractivism, which, despite his work in Venezuela, criticizes the Bolivarian governments’ model of oil dependence. But the body’s relationship to its environment and circumstances is problematic everywhere in the world and in many ways. The old systems of exploitation are being reconfigured hand in hand with scientific and technological advances, which are not only drivers of territorial extractivism but also a vehicle for the maintenance of the body in the role of commodity. Practices such as surrogacy, a topic treated exceptionally in the novel The body is the one that remembersby Paula Puebla, seem a bit like a trustee of slavery and eugenics, while the physical changes aimed at shaping bodies according to contemporary aesthetics have never been so drastic and massive as they have been so far in the 21st century.

The Argentine philosopher Esteban Montenegro, in an essay in which he points out some misunderstandings in the readings often made of Freud (one of which my grandmother knew a little) and Foucault, also focuses on the body and its environment when he says that “the popular classes still remain connected to life through the body” and that “through real, physical work they enter into a direct relationship with the elementary: with necessity, with survival, with one’s own body, the earth, matter, effort, etc.; in short, with the reality principle.” He notes that “the existential class division typical of our time” is between “flexible cosmopolitan usurers who can (and want to) be here today and tomorrow, driven by their desire, and those who are condemned to a sedentary lifestyle.” This type of system is made feasible through different governances. In this sense, Mantonavi states: “Although the progressive governments expressed their differences with the conservative and neoliberal governments of the past and present, they invariably maintained the extractivist style and imperative, which was also linked to the strengthening of national and transnational capital sectors.” In addition, he points out that the actions of bodies exposed to the more or less peaceful struggle against pollution, expropriation or the growth of organized crime around extractivism tend to decline due to the effect of “repression and criminalization”. To the hundreds of activities that were limited to the vertical format of the mobile phone, we could add the online militancy that removed bodies from the territory, like Tinder from the ancient Levant places or Zoom from offices.

Hyperconnected but impoverished, the urban middle classes are the first to be missing from the scenarios in which they have always been present. Whether they are consumers or playing influencers like my grandmother, their members endure the networks’ surveillance and punishment in exchange for dopamine before facing the arduous management of direct experiences. Transfigured, victim of pathologies resulting from immobility, confinement and shielding, the body constantly demands to be called by its name, as if it wishes that its power, increasingly less tied to materiality and movement, could be exercised only in words.