Thinking through the materiality of the body: Elizabeth Grosz, Vivian Sobchack, and Lisa Steele

Lisa Steele - Birthday Suit (with Scars and Defects) (1974)

So, I had a beautiful little moment of clarity today - let's see how long it lasted. I found myself thinking up some interesting ideas for this project while I was in the middle of researching for other things (that’s how it usually happens, for some reason!). I was doing some reading for my thesis work and started finding some really interesting connections (and disjunctions) to two book chapters I was reading side-by-side. They’re both chapters I’ve read before, they were fundamental both to how I began this research blog and to the direction my other research has taken as well. But I never really took the time to consider them together. I’m talking about Elizabeth Grosz’s chapter “Sexed Bodies” from the amazing 1994 book Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism and Vivian Sobchack’s “The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity” from the equally awesome Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. I’d like to think through them a little bit here, and additionally talk through a video by the Canadian video artist Lisa Steele entitled Birthday Suit (With Scars and Defects) from 1974.

Now, in brief summary: I introduced Grosz’s ideas in my introductory post to this blog, but the chapter “Sexed Bodies” ultimately attempts to think about how we can re-insert discussions of biology into feminism and the politics of gender inequality. She attempts to rewrite biologism not as something overly deterministic or ‘innate’ about gender, but still existing as an “irreducible remainder” to the way we understand or conceptualize gender difference. The particularities of men’s and women’s bodies provide corporeal specificities to the ontological statuses of each gender, which in turn becomes re-inscribed into the social values and inequalities that exist between men and women. Essentially, Grosz is considering how the materiality of the gendered body – its irreducible status as meat, as organic matter – contributes to intersubjective relations between men and women:

Instead of seeking sexual identities, the notion of two absolutely separate types of entity, men and women, I have attempted to seek out traces and residues of sexual difference, a difference impossible to unify, impossible to searate from its various others and impossible to identify or seal off in clear-cut terms. (Grosz, 208)

This of course leads to Grosz’s consideration of the female body as an ontologically liquidy, formless, leaking flow – an articulation of female corporeality as ‘abject’ that I’ve been working with throughout this whole project. 

            In “The Passion of the Material,” Sobchack is also focused on the brute materiality of the body, yet while she and Grosz seem to be starting with the same basic interest, they each take it in separate directions. While Grosz is working from a stance of difference (and building awareness of said difference without establishing men as the norm and women as the ‘other’) Sobchack is interested in our fundamental sameness as matter, as body-objects that exist in the world with other things that exert an influence over us that we cannot fully grasp. Through her ‘interobjective’ model, Sobchack is interested in mapping out how the human body creates resonances and influences in spaces beyond our subjectivity and control, but also how these external forces and objects can mutually influence us, undermining our subjectivities and treating our body as another object in space:

This is to say, as intersubjectivity is a structure of engagement with the intentional behavior of other body-objects from which we recognize what it objectively looks like to be subjective, so interobjectivity is a structure of engagement with the materiality of other body-objects on which we project our sense of what it subjectively feels like to be objective. [to be an object, to be matter] (316)         

Sobchack doesn’t really consider gendered relations in this chapter, but I think there could be an interesting discussion there. She does articulate that this vision would involve a set of ethics that understand the fundamental relatedness of all things, and the corresponding imperative to treat the world with ‘care’ based in an awareness that the features that differentiate matter (through gender, etc) are superficial and illusory. (In a discussion about Sartre’s character Roquentin in Nausea, she says: “He is merely differentiated rather than radically differentiated from the objective others and things that surround him.” 309). 

            From sameness to difference, both Grosz and Sobchack are interested in rearticulating relationality, thinking about a new way of imagining how we relate to each other and the surrounding world by foregrounding the materiality of the human body, without resorting to binaristic or hierarchical distinctions between men and women, subjects and objects. That’s why, despite the different directions of their projects (and the somewhat anachronistic time jump from Grosz’s 1994 book to Sobchack’s 2004 publication, forgive me for that) I feel as if these two authors are really working from the same place. Both wish to articulate a model of understanding how the material reality of the body impresses itself upon our relations with the world. Near the end of her chapter Grosz suggests the model of a Mobius strip – “a model which shows that while there are disparate ‘things’ being related, they have the capacity to twist one into the other” (209-210) – which I find particularly interesting in relation to Sobchack’s ideas – while articulating difference and distinction, the Mobius strip still retains connectiveness and pliability, indicating how things can shift and alter throughout time.

            So, that was a bit of a rant – what about Lisa Steele? This video – an extremely influential piece of Canadian feminist art from the 1970s – shows the artist on the occasion of her 27^th birthday, slowly and deliberately cataloguing all the scars and defects across her body for the camera. What is a scar, if not the perfect indication of Sobchack’s idea that the world can impress itself upon our bodies, creating an awareness of our irreducible materiality, our unavoidable state as a body-as-object? A scar is a literal trace of a place where the world exerted an influence over our corporealities, leaving its mark, turning the body into a slowly built-up archive of interobjective relations with the world. Steele’s tape, which “accepts the extent of the consequences” of her clumsiness, could be read as autobiographical, yet not an autobiography of a coherent subject’s actions and choices in the world. Rather, her autobiography of the body-as-object indicates that regardless of our subjective desires and trajectories in the world, our existence as matter – as liquidy, bleeding, flowing, oozing, scratched matter – cannot be erased.

            And incidentally, I just love how she spends so much time running her fingers along each scar, it’s as if she’s allowing her own materiality to come in contact with itself, in some strange way. I bet there’s a discussion to be had here with Merleau-Ponty’s ideas in “The Intertwining – the Chiasm” chapter of The Visible and Invisible – where he talks about his one hand touching the other? That chapter was also highly influential for Sobchack’s “Passion of the Material” text – I wonder if that’s something I should explore further – maybe the next step??

5 minute clip of Birthday Suit on Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak’s website:

http://www.steeleandtomczak.com/video/birthdaysuit.html