To Disappear

Long after the human body expires, as its heart ceases to beat, its lungs atrophy with the lack of air, and its eyes grow pale with the absence of life—long after this end of life, the body goes on. In the months and years that follow the death of a human being, the life of the body flourishes in the soil and dust where its remains now thrive. Over worm inhabited fields and shipwrecked lined seabeds, human bodies begin again, their cosmological orientation now in reverse.

Only the body remains. This strange expression hints at the problem central to a phenomenology of disappearances: with it, a tacit criteria is established, in which phenomenal things can become more apparent than others. The phenomenal plane suffers damage when a human being dies, their “sprit” leaves the flesh of the body leaving an empty shell in the place where life once stood. Nothing remains. But to think of disappearing phenomena in this way means conferring an ethical value upon the movement of disappearances. There are remains that outlive things of the world, and their importance cannot be overlooked.

If the human being dies, leaving only the body in its place, then the same is true in reverse: sometimes, the body remains in place while the self disappears. Here, there is a body, fully responsive to the stimulus of the world, indeed hyper alert to its dangers. Beyond the walls of the eyes, however, there is an uncertainty as to what lurks within. The self retreats from the world, as the body blindly persists in the darkness, its organs and internal structure maintaining homeostatic balance. Only now, at the service of a self whose identity is not entirely clear.

“There is someone in this room.”

“It is the Other’s being-there; i.e., that concrete, historical event which we can express by the words, ‘There is someone in this room.’”

(Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 277).

Wading from one hallway to another in a series of homogenous hotels, offices, and transit terminals, it is sometimes the case that human beings find themselves in rooms populated with other people. Such experiences can occur in a range of environments, from hospital rooms to seminar rooms, from off-world space stations to deep-sea submarine bases. In each case, there is a moment of hesitation at the threshold from one room to another. The body necessarily pauses at the doorway leading to a room, the active intentionality of the body taking time to ingest the facticity of a new room. And the pause in movement is a moment of precarious uncertainty. When I stand at the threshold of a room, my body reaches out into this foreign landscape long before “I” have set a foot in it. My body will assess this room in advance of the “I” who experiences it. As to its new findings, often I will only be in a position to survey the work of the body retroactively, once the room is seized as a partial memory. Until then, every act of entering a room is form of blindness, in which human beings must rely on a tacit faith that the room will mould itself to the contours to the body.

Here is a room and a doorway. I have seen it before. Inside it, a large plant, some cupboards, a window that overlooks a grey cityspace, and a woman sitting behind a small desk, her head held in the palm of her hand. Still at the threshold to this room, my body is nonetheless in the midst of a dynamic correspondence with the irreducible aura permeating from this corner of the world. The woman is not looking at me, and yet the room’s being stems from her presence. Everything within the room occupies a specific relation to the woman, and her presence is foreground in this field of intentionality despite her being objectively less visible. More than one thing among many, the woman commands the room without even raising her eyes in the general direction of the room’s spatiality. Things in this room revolve around the body of the woman, such that if she were removed, then those same things would lose their bearings and thus become inanimate.

The dynamic interplay of the women in the room does not limit itself to things she possesses within the room. The reason being: when I enter this room, then I do so knowing that the act of orientating myself in the room must in the first instant involve a dialectical standoff between the spatiality of my-self and my-other. Sartre writes: “We are dealing with a relation which is without parts, given at one stroke, inside of which there unfolds a spatiality which is not my spatiality; for instead of a grouping toward me of the objects, there is now an orientation which flees from me” (254). Sartre’s point makes it clear that space is not homogenous, but forever marked by a tacit claim of ownership achieved by the look. Even without directly looking at me, the women in the room seizes the room in the same way as “when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a slight movement of a curtain” (257). The look possesses. In other words, the woman directs the spatiality of the room, such that I am brought into her own sphere of being while recognising “a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting” (255).

This relationship between a centralized and decentralized world means that the look carries with it an estranging affect. In entering a room, the universe slides away from me. Doing so, a new bodily mood is conceived, which has less to do with getting placed in objective terms and more to do with adjusting to the material conditions under which the look is presented. To be looked at is to commit to a dialogue not only with the other but also with the environment in which that exchange takes place. The look means recognising that “I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place and that I cannot in any case escape from the space in which I am without defence—in short, that I am seen” (259). At the heart of this disturbing affectivity is the non visual perception of both the room and the other’s look, each of which have contribute to the other’s agency. In each case, it becomes possible to speak of being seen by eyes without a face, a look that is taken up as much in the posture of the woman as it is in the décor of the room.

Getting (Dis)placed

I am beginning to make inroads into the research at the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée that lies ahead. As with any new project, the difficulty is one of getting placed, of establishing orientation amidst a labyrinth of different ideas, all of which are framed between the themes of embodiment, inter-subjectivity, and agoraphobia. My point of departure is the following question: how can the gaze of the other make me disappear? I have skirted around this question in various ways before, mostly through considering Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety and the Nothing. But the question is deserving of a far broader analysis than metaphysics alone. After all, the question invites several different perspectives: that of clinical psychopathology (as a “fault” in the subject); that of neurology (as an experience to be explained in causal terms); that of cultural studies (as a “symptom” of late modernity); and that of environment studies (as when the subject is unknowingly affected by the materiality of the world).

Central to each of these perspectives is the mediation of the world via the other. It is not, for instance, that there is a world, in which other people populate. But that the facticity of the world is already constituted by others long before others are perceived in the world. This is the “interworld” of which Merleau-Ponty speaks of in relation to intersubjectivity. It is a world, in which the anonymity of the prepersonal body is bound with all other bodies, thus producing a bodily synthesis. It seems to me that in non-pathological instances of embodiment, this interworld is taken for granted as a structure of the lifeworld. Being in the world means being exposed to inter-corporeality of bodily interaction. In certain atypical instances, however—anxiety, illness, phobia—the experience of the interworld assumes a foreground presence, affecting a disturbance in the stability of selfhood, such that the idea of the body as autonomous loses its certainty. Such a loss would, I think, be felt more acutely were it the case that the body in question refused to accommodate the existence of the other as other. In my understanding, agoraphobia is an exemplary instant of this refusal.

All of which is a thematic preview of things to come. In the first instance, what will be required is a microcosmic examination of the experience of entering a room. The reason being: entering a room presents us with a series of topographical contrasts, each of which edify how the gaze of the other affects and augments the experience of the world. In particular, entering a room populated by other people sets in place a circumscribed illustration of how embodiment, spatiality, and otherness work together to produce what is peculiar to both the typical and atypical body. More on that later.

The Nesting

Suddenly the landscape was removed from me by a strange power. In my mind’s eye I thought I saw below the pale blue evening sky a black sky of horrible intensity. Everything became limitless, engulfing. . . I knew the autumn landscape was pervaded by a second space, so fine, so invisible, that it was dark, empty and ghastly. . . . It was wrong to speak only of space because something took place in myself; it was a continuous questioning of myself.

(Schizophrenic patient cited in Karl Jaspers, A General Psychopathology)