“Naked flesh”—A somatic calling of the “mind”?

It was the year 1969, and the “priest” of Critical Theory T.W. Adorno was about to begin his seminar “Introduction to dialectics” at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. In the end, the seminar did not take place because something unusual happened. Three half-naked female students popped up and jumped on Mr Adorno, trying to “rape” him demonstratively with kisses and erotic pantomime. One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century left the room in disgust. His “final maxim” reads: Die Welt ist falsch—the world is false (which also translates as “evil”, “fake”, “wrong”, “deceitful”, “mistaken”).

Twelve years later, in his foreword to Critique of Cynical Reason, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk considers “breasts attack” as key to analysing “neocynicism”. He sees what happened in Frankfurt as typical of the era of cynicism: on one side stood a bitter old man of experience—a brilliant philosopher who had developed an exclusively reduced sense of sensitivity and aestheticism, and who was a priori emotionally against anything to do with power and that contributed to the pragmatic reproduction of the “false world”. Juxtaposed against this was “naked flesh”—the body which, in its vitality, is a critique of the elitist, exclusive assumption of indestructible sensitivity. “Physiognomic thought” is practiced as critique by means of “naked violence”, and the Enlightenment pushes its way from top to bottom. “Cynicism in action”, followed by sexism, factuality and psychologism, conflates the true with the untrue, and the just with the unjust, in an indecisive flood of ambivalence.

Wherever deceptions are constitutive for a culture, wherever life in society succumbs to a compulsion for lying, there really speaking the truth has an element of aggression, an unwelcome exposure (Sloterdijk, 1983, pp. 27-28).

The “unwelcome exposure” and “naked flesh” are mainly characteristic of the actionism found in Central Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. In Vienna, in 1962, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl and Adolf Frohner dismembered a lamb. Afterwards they cast its entrails on their bodies in a performance entitled Blutorgel. Nitsch (keeping Freud’s notion of the subconscious in reserve and Nietzsche’s “vitalism” in the front line) launched his “theatre of orgies and mysteries”—“black masses”, who attempted to induce a complex catharsis in the participants through psychophysical shock—referring to, for instance, the process of anamnesis of ever-present death and the roots of the European paganism and mysteries that were systematically cleansed at the turn of millennia under the motto a malo mundatum (cleansed from evil).^[1] American visual artist Carole Schneemann in her series of performances entitled Meat Joy (1964) tried to invoke the mass “telepathy of psychosexual trance” while covering participants with pieces of meat, letting them interact in an “eroticoccult” séance, touching and experiencing “meat joy”. Finally, there is the “breasts attack” on Adorno which from afar resembles Imponderabilia, a performance by Marina Abramović and Ulay given in Bologna in 1977, during which they “blocked” the gallery’s entrance with their own naked bodies so visitors could only pass through this “naked gate” en face, forced to choose between the two genders they came into contact with—turning either to the feminine or the masculine body. This psychosomatic forcing of social interactions within nudity was intended to demonstrate the so-called imponderabilia of these communication events.

What does the body do and what does it critique within the realm of artistic communication? Does it critique? If so, what is the target of the critique? How does it critique? From what standpoint? Does it pass judgment on the unbearable deeds of parents or grandparents? Does it find fault with the Catholic-nationalist “morality” partly responsible for crimes against humanity? Does it criticize society for exonerating itself from dreadful deeds committed in the past? Does it pass comment on the militant restoration of a country? Does it have something to say about the “war of consciousness” in which liars call liars liars? Does it criticize without maintaining its distance from the target of the criticism? Does it engage in criticism as “microbiology”? Does the body perform critique at all? Let’s leave the critique of cynicism and cynical remarks to Sloterdijk and observe what happens in the realm of artistic communication following the “body’s impact”.

In his treatise on painting Idea del Tempio della Pittura, first printed in 1590 in Milan, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo recommended artists conceal any traces of the working process, to, figuratively speaking, sweep everything under the carpet. Actionism, Performance and Body Art all transcend this “norm”. Within a particular social environment, they embrace and perform human activities in concreto, rather than through mimesis— masturbation, the killing of animals, the exposure of flesh are not depicted through representation, through the use of a “substitute” (as, for example, in Schiele’s Eros (1911) or Rembrandt’s Defeat (1655)), but are performed “as such”. Nudity on display in a gallery in Bologna is not seen as a representation of nudity nor does it refer to nudity. It is a form of social interaction—in nudity and with nudity. Various human acts, reactions and interactions are not so much objects as tools of observation. It is not that the body is observed, but that there is observation on the body itself. The body observes the act as a disposable, irreplaceable ontological event, which becomes a social interaction that does not disappear. Moreover, it becomes part of the social fabric—it is neither epiphenomenal nor phenomenal; it is ontologically real and socially relevant.

Whatever these expressions deal with—love, violence, gender, death, sexuality, the killing of animals, ritual practices and myths, ecology, the critiquing of ideology and so forth—they all share in common an explicit and demonstrative corporeality. The body ceases to sweep things under the carpet—“the action is the message”, as Marshall McLuhan the media theorist would have put it (McLuhan, 1994). What characterizes the body is its resolute rejection of the objective modalities of normativity—the body rebels against commands and prohibitions—these being the two basic elements of traditional and modern normative systems.^[2] This reminds us of the old well-known Cartesian “psychophysical problem” of the body-mind dichotomy. Here the body is making its voice heard. Is it attacking “the muddled Enlightenment”, which ended in gulags and concentration camps (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2004, pp. 177-217)? What is the intention of bodily critique? Does it resist being determined by “L’homme machine”, and colonized by various “corporates of the mind”? —Is it that the body no longer wants to be a “perfect machine”—part of the bureaucratic (often murderous) machinery as diagnosed by Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1964)? Is it that

the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs (Foucault, 2000, p. 30).

Is it just the body’s final shout in the need to communicate something? Is it only after all these attempts at negative self-determination that the body realizes it cannot escape from the web of political usurpation (negative self-determination becomes an inherent part of biopower)—that it cannot escape the microphysics of power?

In this way, the body could well be communicating its own fantasy about the separation of “pure mind” (or reason) as a purulent wound of European dualism. At this stage a brief summary of Descartes’ deductive method and his ideas on the bifurcation of reality into two created substances with no causal relation would be helpful. Descartes systematically doubted ontological reality before concluding there is only one epistemological and ontological certainty—his doubting. Doubt became his only certainty. He could doubt no longer that he was doubting—cogito ergo sum became an epistemological and ontological maxim: how do I know that I exist? Because I think (doubt). How do I know that I think (doubt)? Because I think (doubt). It was at this point that Descartes made his most important and controversial discovery. I know that I think (therefore I am), because I think—I cannot doubt my doubting—is a truly self-referential logical paradox, a tautology par excellence, that has become the basis of metaphysical rationalism (Descartes, 2009). That is a real contradiction. And the discovery? Descartes hit the neuralgic point of anthropological epistemology: I know that I think because I think—which is a self-referential loop characteristic of neurobiological constructivism. Consciousness evaluates its own evaluation methods: any detection and reception of immediate reality by the perceptual and cognitive processes is evaluated and judged by the perceptual and cognitive processes.^[3]

It is like a postgraduate student considering and assessing his own dissertation. In the case of consciousness; however, the basic legal principle of nemo index in causa sua (no one should judge his own case) does not apply here. There is no external reference point for consciousness; no external authority; no advisory committee—it must rely on itself. This shows the unbeatable limitation of all epistemology in contemporary discourse.

Self-reference—referring to oneself—is another feature evident when the body is in action. In this case human activity is a self-referential event fixing public attention on a unique social space created by performers and actionists. Who is killing the animals, pouring their insides, masturbating, exposing themselves? None other than me—there is no external reference. Who is judging and taking responsibility? Me—not something I might represent. It is human activity in concreto, on a plate. The “body” reminds the “mind” that their collective actions cannot be replaced, performed by anyone or anything else; they are not evaluated or judged by an external authority. Psychosomatic actions evaluate and judge themselves.

In this respect, some current monistic attempts to unify the “body” and “mind”, such as “neurobiological monism”, are worth a mention. German neurobiologist Gerhard Roth criticizes Descartes’ dualism for the deductive step Descartes took once he realized he could not question the fact that he was doubting: he felt obliged to suggest a medium for such doubt—the reasoning subject. This “agent of doubt”—a vehicle for the Self, a thinking substance, subject and “spirit”—was localized in the epiphysis (the area of the brain that produces both the sleep hormone melatonin and the only endogenic hallucinogen DMT, trace amounts of which can be found in the human body). Roth called Descartes’ step the radical reduction of knowledge to “the thinking Self”, which is the result of a cardinal ideological fallacy—the “certainty” that the process of thinking necessarily requires an agent called “the Self”. According to Roth, the facticity of the “I think” status does not necessarily logically imply the existence of an “I” that thinks. In making this argument, Roth is using an example from psychiatry. Doctors often deal with patients who can think and yet claim that it is not they who are thinking; or, who ultimately have no concept of themselves, or where they are. Others claim they are somebody other than whom they appear to be; that they are impersonating several people in one body or that they are “stuck” in the wrong body (despite being able to think).These are known as “dissociative disorders” (Roth, 2009, pp. 148-149).

Roth assumes that there is no thinking substance, no Self-identity. He takes the view that experiencing one’s identity of the Self stands for a set of specific states of consciousness which are experienced as continuous. Linking these states together implies an “illusion of identity” as a state of consciousness. In other words, we are looking for the roots of the several “I’s” that constitute the person.

Up to this point, both I (fine artist) and Roth (neurobiologist) agree with one another. Where we differ, however, is on an issue relevant to all the humanities—free will. Would I be capable (as a linkage of various states of consciousness) of writing this article differently from how I in fact did? Can I act differently? (I have just reached for a cup of tea; could I have decided differently?) Roth’s reply is no. Humans cannot act other than they actually do. For if human action is a manifestation of conscious processes, then it follows that the conscious process of experiencing is preceded by pre-conscious (subconscious) activities in the brain, lasting from 250 to 1000 milliseconds.

Roth supports his argument by referring to research by John Haynes (professor at Humboldt University in Berlin) known as “Mind Reading” (Roth, 2009, p. 139). In an experiment he proved that if we managed to “train” artificial neuron networks in such a way that they were able to recognize pre-conscious activity in the brain’s visual perception or decision-making area (doing it better than the “untrained eye”), then it would be very likely that we could predict the content of consciousness in advance—from one to several seconds prior to the “target victim” of this pre-conscious manipulation actioning them.

Paradoxically, in an attempt to overcome dualism, “monistic neurobiology” allows this dualism to take effect as an old “demon” called epiphenomenalism. Whenever the categories of “primary” (pre-conscious activities) and “secondary” (conscious activities) appear, this is an instance of dualism, which implies phenomenalism and epiphenomenalism. If conscious activities are considered in relation to pre-conscious activities, the action itself always becomes an epiphenomenon. At this point, “subliminal determinism” appears, which may work in favour of the non-existence of free will. But let’s go back to the “Mind Reading” experiment. In this case, the non-existence of free will is proved by the “subliminal” manipulation of subconscious processes. But what is this a manifestation of?

At this point, the “epiphenomenology of corporeality”—in action—comes into play. However, my perspective is based on the heuristic assumption that action is neither phenomenal nor epiphenomenal, but that it is ontologically real—that it cannot be subsumed within a primary substance. (As, for example, in Edmund Husserl’s thinking on the body, which does not see it as the subject of experience, for the subject of experience is the pure Self, which is the immaterial and metaphysical Self occupying the body, which is its opposite, its object, and this leads us to “modernistic” metaphysical dualism (Husserl, 2006)). What I would like to propose here, however, is not a “phenomenology of corporeality” but an “ontology of corporeality”. Artistic Actionism, Performance and Body Art in all their manifestations obstinately draw our attention to the ontological presence of the body—to its ontologically real extensionality, which cannot be categorized into other derived boxes, built by “corporations of the mind” in an a priori hierarchy.

These could be communicated by the body through its actions, or, put simply, communication could be mediated by the body itself. In one respect, the body could show the “corporations of the mind” how to mediate communication. Abramović and Ulay in Bologna succeeded in creating a unique social environment for “claustrophobic nudity”: the gallery’s entrance was narrowed down to the minimal width of the human arm; on one side stood Marina, naked, while on the other stood Ulay, also naked. Each visitor was lured in, to pass through the “gate of claustrophobic nudity”. Anyone who wanted to enter the gallery had to pass through the “mystery of communication”, a third, reciprocal element that “naked flesh” sticks to. Thus visitors are “forced” to participate in the communication act by making their own “gender” decision—which sex do they “prefer” to communicate with? Communication is mediated in this interaction: we are speaking about how we communicate together. The body reminds us that it has always been present in all its nudity in any social operation—doing the shopping, a kiss goodbye before leaving for work, chatting on skype in real virtuality or during a lecture on phenomenology. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann provides us with a clue: “But what is ‘Spirit’, if not a metaphorical circumlocution for the mystery of communication?” (Luhmann, 1995, p. 21). Communication remains the mystery.^[4] That is precisely what the performance of Imponderabilia was striving to communicate in Bologna: the unquantifiable risks of social unpredictable, imponderable and irreplaceable interactions. For what we communicate are often misunderstandings that “bring about” the uniqueness, originality and unmeasurable impact of each social event. As a result, we welcome the long-familiar methodological solutions of the so-called humanities: hermeneutics. Our paradigmatic obsession with our “efforts to understand” often conceals the naked reality—that what we communicate are often misunderstandings.^[5](Unfortunately, any precondition for a peaceful consensus often ends up in a destructive “war of consciousness”.) But what if the problem lies in the solution itself? “Social narcissism”— which implies the communication precondition that “you understand me and I understand you”—can easily lead to the issue of mediating misunderstandings in communication being suppressed, left aside unprocessed and unnoticed. Yet we already know that suppressed issues never disappear (there is nowhere for them to go). Quite the contrary—they accumulate and one day tap us on the shoulder by surprise. Perhaps a change in assumption could help—one that involves personal acceptance and seeing our mutual misunderstandings as the starting point of communication. Maybe this would lead out into the unexplored waters of the communication of misunderstandings. This would, however, require a higher level of concentration and greater empathy and mutual tolerance so a certain form of equity can be communicated—equity in misunderstanding. Social love could thus be re-defined as a willingness to communicate misunderstandings.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, said Adorno in the 1950s (Adorno, 1977, p. 30). With this ethical-aesthetic “maxim” (which shocked many people), he set in motion “a different kind of ethos”. The phrase “After Auschwitz” was intended to mean that art would “cease” to serve snobs by becoming a compilation of aesthetic compliments and kind-hearted offerings, wrapping society’s awareness in the illusion of participating in “cultural” life. Many artists took Adorno’s challenge seriously. Their responses were not necessarily compilations of aesthetic compliments or kind-hearted offerings, but they communicated many things. Human action and decision-making became the centre of attention in relation to exclusivity in the art world. They entered its unique social environment of communication. Human activity is a self-referential, irreplaceable and irrepressible event that strives to rise above “phenomenological ethics” and enter the realm of “ontological ethics”.