[from the archives] body politic + deep story
from October 2020, on the eve of the US elections. feat. Arlie Hochschild, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock, and Joan Didion
Issue 10 features the artwork of Paris-based Swiss “performer and plastic artist” Caroline Denervaud. Her work blurs the boundaries of performance and art as she uses the body as both instrument and subject to create larger-than life shapes and scapes.
hello friend,
The privilege and weight of landing in your inbox on the eve of (hopefully?) the most fateful election of our lifetimes is not lost on me. Even as this community spans oceans and continents, I know from having lived abroad for the majority of the last four years that this is not only a matter of American significance.
So here, I want to carve a sliver of space for us to reflect, check in with ourselves and each other, gather some threads of hope, take a deep collective breath in, and release a heavy sigh out.
One theme recirculating in conversation with many of you recently is the way the trepidation, anticipation, forecasting, and bracing are showing up in very physical ways. If you’re finding it hard to focus on much else right now, you’re not alone. The last four years, and especially the last ten months, have sedimented into our bodies, and it’s hard for these weeks and days not to feel like some sort of culmination.
One question I’ve been grappling with lately is: how do we (/I /you /they) feel politics? How do we feel this disconnect between helplessness and scale and systems too big to grasp and the small forms of activism, the protest, the casting of a vote (and the wondering what, if anything, “counts”) in our bodies?
In Within, which kicked off last Sunday, we’ve spent time in conversation with a part of our body we have tended to associate with doing, producing, performing, working. Our bodies are speaking up in surprising ways—with humor, attitude, cunningness. We are implored to listen.
This morning I scribbled: “whiplash, shock // i feel it in my neck, my upper spine ; disorientation // i feel it in my temples and behind my eyebrows ; hope // i feel it in the space between my shoulders, arching my heart forward ; dashed // i feel my shoulders cave, heart turtled inward ; anticipation // i am holding my breath.”
Issue 10 of T H E | L I M I N A L considers the laden concept of the body politic in conversation with the deep story—Arlie Hochschild’s term for the embodied, emotional narratives we craft to inform our felt truth.
I’m curious about how we feel and experience (differently) this political moment, the eve of the election, in our physical-emotional bodies. And how these feelings supplant, or inform, “fact” (especially in a world where “facts” are so destabilized). And also how awareness of our own felt, sensory body politic(s) can be a starting point, an entry, to an expanded awareness of the (embodied) body politic(s) of others—others who may not share our subject position. Whose bodies and lives may be the site of very different, no less real, stakes.
Whatever happens on Tuesday and in the weeks and months to follow, if any of it still feels unfathomable, inaccessible: whose stories (one’s own body’s included) do you need to listen to, to convince yourself it is not? Who else’s reality can you try to understand, if you cannot inhabit it? How can you more deeply inhabit your own?
xx
A
MUSING OF THE MOMENT
body politic + deep story
In their foundational work on embodiment in medical anthropology, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987) write about the “three bodies” — the individual body, the social body, and the body politic. Scaling outward, they describe the body politic as a site of social and political control. A site where abstract power is condensed into normative values of the “correct” body, “health” becomes an instrument of virtue and labor, wily bodies and sensual expression get regulated, boundaries are erected and felled, and movement and behaviour become the Gepetto strings of the state. Emotion, Scheper-Hughes and Lock argue, is the “mediatrix” of the three bodies—the thing that cuts across all of them, or rather weaves them together. They call for attention to the cultural politics of emotion (if this interests you, I highly recommend Sara Ahmed’s work of the same title)
Corporeal metaphors hold clues to the politics of our times. A quick search into “body politic”’s etymology led me to Jacques Rousseau’s work of the same title, which purportedly inspired the French Revolution (“no true democracy has ever existed, nor ever will exist”). Here, “body” operates more in the sense of a collective than an organism. Body politic appears to have medieval origins, referring to the “King’s two bodies”—the “body natural” (the king’s corporeal being) was separate from the “body politic” (their sovereign, spiritual, body—[conveniently] rooting political power in the divine).
This separation has been well-deconstructed by important scholarship, public and academic, (not to mention the dissolution of many monarchies) in centuries since. Today, the term body politic is taken up in vast contexts—from the fantastic work of this queer feminist wellbeing collective, recently spawning a support group for people with long-term COVID under the same name; to the supra-title of countless books, novels , academic articles, and news media columns. Body politic seems compelling insofar as we try to understand the mutable relationship between the collective and the individual organism, as we search for a home in both.
I’ve been thinking about body politic in slightly different but no less related terms lately. That the personal is political, if it were ever in question, has impressed upon us its fact this year. In fact, the fact-iveness (is that even a word? it autocorrected to “fictiveness” which I think is deeply telling) of political systems worldwide are rapidly being contested and displaced by their felt-ness. We are touching upon, feeling into, an expanded notion of the body politic—not only as a site of control but also a site of felt knowing, a source of information when our other sources of information get increasingly contested, a site capable of both empathy and violence, a site absolutely not to be dismissed.
These thoughts were recently inspired revisiting the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild, which I read in my first years of my PhD, through this podcast interview from 2018. “Deep story,” Hochschild’s term for “felt truth,” or “what you feel about a highly salient situation that’s very important to you,”is a concept she develops from five years of research with the far-right/Trump supporters in the South. Listening to the deep stories of people whose “truths” were incommensurable to her own, Hochschild develops a compelling argument for emotional intelligence, deep listening, and empathy in political life.
Hochschild’s vision today may feel like a faraway panacea. But it can start with the kinds of stories we tell to ourselves (and the kinds of stories, different stories, we are willing to open ourselves to) and where we tell them from. I know the past year(s) in particular has called into question the limits of what can be listened to or empathized with. Still, the deep stories we tell, the felt truths hidden in our body politic, seem now more important than ever.
Joan Didion famously said, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We are being pushed to (and beyond) the limits of our methods to cope as a collective. Living, surviving, bearing witness, contributing to the historical record, the radical practice of hope… all seem to be reaching for a body. The question is whether (and how) we listen.
WRITING PROMPT
What does the term “body politic” mean in the context of your own life and body? Where in your body do you locate or feel a) the current political moment, b) the sedimentation of the last four years?
RESOURCES
TO LISTEN:
Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle on the Ezra Klein Show. Highly recommend. Dialogues directly with issues 08 and 09 (if you missed them, catch up here) (pw: theliminal2020).
I’m always curious about the practices and routines of creative people. I recently discovered and have been enjoying the Routines & Ruts podcast.
TO WATCH:
Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017) on Netflix. I can’t believe it took me three years to get to this! An intimate portrait of a literary legend.
TO READ:
The Year of Breath by Gabrielle Bellot. An incredibly moving (and, fair warning, heavy) meditation on breath, life, death, and political violence.
Radical Hope in a Time of Despair by Shefali Desai. A narrative braid weaving hearing loss, asylum law, land dispossession, and radical hope.
TO GIVE:
The Philadelphia Bail Fund is doing important work to support the protestors of the murder of Walter Wallace Jr. by police. You can also support the family of Walter Wallace Jr here, and sign the petition calling for justice and the use of trained mental health professionals to respond to mental health crises instead of police.