Gaze — feeler — glue: How bodies aid in the sealing of the trench between human and non-human

With tutorship from Dr. Mariella Greil

1 December 2023

INTRODUCTION

“Where does anything begin? In the middle perhaps? Not with ‘you’ or ‘I’ but somewhere in-between?” (McLean, 2021, 216). 

Influenced by Fluxus, but more so by the notion of microperformativity and its quality of aliveness (Hauser and Strecker, 2020, 1), my focus is on the everyday, where context is weaved together (Sheringham, 2007, 141). The everyday hosts agency and aliveness. The everyday holds space for human and non-human. The everyday becomes my studio. 

In this expanded studio condition, rhizomatic structures, liminoids and neophytes roam free, bodies intermingle, and uncertainty and not-knowing are the preferred choice for breakfast. Things become tentacular, as Haraway (2016) would phrase it. Here, non-traditional art practices, such as being on the receiving end of physiotherapy, are unencumbered by conventions and thus open up gravitational shifts of perspective, allowing for a sealing to occur between human and non-human. In the everyday, bodies, entelechies, lookers are supple and held together (both physically and metaphorically) by moist fascia, and their undulating and somewhat diffracted gaze palpitates inward and outward. Every now and then, one is being-looked-at.

SEALING

Within this inquiry, the term sealing is composed of the word seal, referring to the aquatic and terrestrial mammal, as well as sealing, coming from seal, an adhesive or binder. The term as it is used in this research, although listed within its etymology (Merriam-Webster, 2023), does not allude to the act of seal hunting but rather the opposite, the creation of a sealing practice imbibed with somatic (see the term fascia) and imaginary methods aimed at embodying this watery creature. In addition, the seal, as in sealant, is understood as a porous body, emphasising the permeability and trans-corporeality of the medium (Alaimo, 2010). The seal finds itself in “a world in which all social and ontological boundaries are porous and can be crossed under specific circumstances, a world of becomings and metamorphoses, in which no entity precedes the sets of relations that bring it into being” (Franke, 2021, 39).

The overarching aim of my wider research is to tackle the trench between human and non-human as well as human and nature, developing a practice that seals these together. Having being-looked-at (see definition of the term below) by a seal, this animal has become an important marker in this peregrination. A seal is a liminal creature living both in water and on land. The seal needs access to land to breathe air, rest and procreate but is rather clumsy in this environment, as its bodily shape is better adjusted to the aquatic landscape. Therefore, in the water, it is agile and can hunt and feed. So this animal is adapted to an environment, in this case water, where its stay is limited by breath. However, remaining on land will keep it hungry. Without one of the two, it will not survive. The seal needs both aqua and terra and is a creature of both. This liminal quality of being both renders the binary invalid and thus is the first step to sealing the human and non-human divide.

To access this liminality, the sealing practice embarked upon also partly involves becoming seal, pertaining to the Deleuzian “phenomenon [of becoming,] where one being becomes like another being—not in a literal sense, but neither as an imitation nor a resemblance” (Kessler, 2019, 36). In Feldenkrais, a somatic movement practice, visualisation exercises are applied in which body parts are imaginarily moved in particular ways without physically instilling movement. Nevertheless, these visualisation still bring about change in the physical body. Evidence exists that utilising visualisations does positively contribute to, for example, muscle-building, emphasising a neurophysiological connection between the mind and the muscle (Hynes and Turner, 2020, 1). One aspect of the sealing practice brought forward here is that it implements this visualisation strategy, bringing together and thus forming a human and non-human, a human-and-seal interrelatedness, a seal kinship, a becoming seal through imagination.

“The border of separation between the fully ‘human’ and its others – the primitive, the savage, the animal, the insane – is not simply a given, but a cultural construction and evolutionary product at the same time, with some distinctions arguably less mutable than others – for the border between a plant and a human to be crossed, an entire cosmology and its order of the elements would need to be upset.” (Franke, 2021, 39)

Tracing back these evolutionary lines, it becomes obvious that both seal and human have their beginnings in the water (Neimanis, 2023, 64), water sealing us together. We, as bodies of water, are invited “into a different kind of relation to other bodies of water, and a feminism of relation” (Neimanis, 2023, 64), a hydrofeminism. Crossing an entire cosmology, as Franke phrases it (Franke, 2021, 39), suddenly becomes fluid, sponging and imbibing. Human and seal suddenly swim together in the same cosmos. [As will be discussed in the concluding remarks, the term wetsuiting finds an entry point here as an additional method for sealing.]

BEING-LOOKED-AT

In the rhizomatic experience of the everyday, humans search and find, look around, and sometimes, something or someone looks back at them. [I have opted for the verb ‘looking’, although I’m very conscious of its humancentric dimension - a human ‘looks’ but does a stone? Are eyes needed? What constitutes a gaze? To describe in words an action by a non-human falls into the human realm of semiotics and can never be true to what it tries to describe. ‘Looking’ or ‘gaze’ already exist in our vocabulary and have the advantage of comprising of a reciprocal and especially somatic component that I’m after - we can feel someone’s gaze.] Sensing this gaze is a corporeal experience — it could be understood as an aha moment, a deep sinking in yes or a shift in attitude, a change in direction, moving to the next slide. A wink. It feels like a wake-up call, a friendly one. It’s as if the right pair of reading glasses are finally found, and now the combination of words makes sense. The deciding puzzle piece. Light feels brighter. A gentle hand holding your arm. An inspiration.

This sensation is perceived to be happening in our interiority (Descola, 2014, 116). However, I claim that something or someone external triggered it, at least in part, and that the combination, the intra-action (Barad, 2012), of our sense of interiority and the external trigger, gives rise to this experience of being-looked-at.

This something or someone looking, the looker, can be a stone, a character in a film, a neighbour, a conversation, a strawberry, an idea, a bear, a teddy bear, barely making it to the train, a word, a hug, dry bread, etc. It relates, to a certain degree — I expand the non-human to include actions or situations, to Jane Bennet’s conception of vitality by which she “mean[s] the capacity of things­ — edibles, commodities, storms, metals … to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett, 2010, viii). Therefore, in the everyday, I understand there to exist a non-hierarchical and diffractive (Fox and Alldred, 2021) [“Imagine accidentally picking up a book written by Y or encountering an artwork of Z. It may very well be that the reader or viewer is interpellated by Y’s writing (van der Tuin 2014) or affected by Z’s artwork (Papenburg and Zarzycka 2013) before having consciously recapitulated one’s position as scholar, one’s feminist stance or the makers’ canonical representation. This implies that one cannot presume to know when and where scholarship begins, when and how feminism is triggered or how a text or artefact is liked or disliked. The diffractive moment is when such interpellations or affections happen. The surprise of an interpellation or of affect is taken to be a moment of insight that is of importance for the production of knowledge.” (Van der Tuin, 100, 2021)] reciprocity between human and non-human encounter, exchange, and engagement through the notions of looking at and being-looked-at, as humans and non-humans, as (watery) bodies are affecting as much as they are affected (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, 2).

The experience of being-looked-at provides the foundation for the formation of my methodology and approach to art and performance-making. Instead of actively engaging in problem-solving, design-thinking, method-making and searching for answers to my research questions, the attention is on waiting to being-looked-at. In this process, I’m sensitive to and embrace Erin Manning, who writes that a “method stops potential on its way, cutting into the process before it has had a chance to fully engage with the complex relational fields the process itself calls forth” (Manning, 2016, 33-34). By letting these somatic incidents of being-looked-at perform and develop their own agency and potential, they engender an assemblage-like, rhizomatic and non-linear understanding of what is to be worked with, of what makes up a work of art, of what is included within it, and what it does not comprise of, so to speak. Somehow, I find myself sitting around the table with the lookers, co-creating.

“What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.” (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 1977, 69 in De Langa, 2016)

By engaging in this process of being-looked-at, a work's final assemblage, its final form, is never foreseeable. The focus is on co-making [Co-making with non-humans can take time, as the occurrence of these moments of being-looked-at is unpredictable. However, in my practice, I have discovered certain conditions that appear to be more hospitable and inviting for non-human collaboration. Without going into too much detail, these conditions can be brought about by an openness to notions of animacy as proposed by Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2020), enveloping not-knowing and uncertainty, asking materials or objects how they want to be developed or worked with (for example, the materiality of clay pushes back into the hands of the person working with it), actively engaging in seemingly unrelated activities, changing surroundings, and entering a state of embodiment and haptic sensing through somatic practices to name but a few.], co-performing with the non-human, spinning new rhizomatic connections amongst the lookers and myself, rather than entertaining anthropocentric and methodological notions of the artistic genius or the plantation model (Edge Effects Magazine, 2019). These connections hold together a work of art, like a bag [I would like to extend a soft link here to The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin.].

FASCIA

Paraphrasing my physiotherapist, it is impossible to isolate the fascia from the muscle when massaging the body; they are inextricably interwoven (Hendriks, 2023). Nevertheless, a gentle but firm pushing movement is applied to the top of my foot, a slow unidirectional rubbing, releasing sticky fascia and altering the proprioception, interoception and somatically sensed ontology of the body. Suddenly, when turning my foot to the far left, I no longer experienced a clear limit to the movement, which had felt like hitting a concrete wall. It now feels like a soft buffer, like a pillow, with no clear edge, giving the illusion that my foot could carry on turning. My movements are more fluid. By having my fascia massaged, I lose a sense of limitedness.

Being made up of elastin and collagen and suspended in ground substance, various types of fascia act not only as a lubricant for muscles but also hold them in place, just “like bags” (Hendriks, 2023). Additionally, fascia tissue “is able to wrap, interpenetrate, support, and form the bloodstream, bone tissue, meningeal tissue, [and] organs” (Bordoni et al., 2023). This ubiquitous, glue-like connective tissue has no centre, resembling a net or a rhizome. With various interdependent layers at different depths in the body, it “forms a three-dimensional mechano-metabolic structure” (Bordoni et al., 2023). As a sensory organ, it houses mechanosensors that are able to detect pressure or stretch, which influences the state of the fascia: it shapeshifts, it’s both, like the seal — fascia can transform from almost liquid or fluid to stiff and rigid (SciShow, 2019). Besides its mechanical properties, fascia is also involved in emotion regulation, possibly due to its ties to the autonomic nervous system and its porosity, as everything that wants to go through the body has to go through the fascia, an example being hormones (SciShow, 2019).

Considering fascias’ entanglement in feeling, both physically and emotionally, I want to draw a connection to the Latin word tentaculum, meaning ‘feeler’. Fascia as feeler, fascia as tentaculum, fascia as tentacle, and fascia as the tentacular, which “are also nets and networks” (Haraway, 2016, 2).

Tentacularity, a term housed by Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, “is about life lived along lines” (Haraway, 2016, 2), along networks.

Besides the ability to feel (in) the body, Fascia also extends her feelers towards the non-human — we are able to not only sense interoceptionally, but also experience, for example, touch from an external source. By having my fascia massaged, by having them touched by another, I lose a sense of limitedness and instead sense an ability to reach out further — the tentacles are extending into a broader network and ecology of critters and things. In some parts of my body, I can’t even make out a separation between the hand of my physiotherapist and my body, it feels like one mesh, one sensation — through fascia, I’m connected.

Within my research, I think and feel through fascia, understanding it as the somatic and connective (referring here to its ontology as connective tissue) component in a wider practice ecology. More specifically, with the notion of being-looked-at casting a wide net of seemingly unrelated lines of influence, fascia tissue quite literally resembles the rhizomatic structure of this methodology as well as acts as the connective glue, sealing these interlaced trails together, forming an assemblage.

Fascia is about holding the body together, holding the body of work together, holding the body of a work together, while remaining both fluid and stiff, flexible and certain, embracing non-static stability, and embodying precise vagueness along lines. Travelling along these lines are liquid drops made of a watery substance, little bodies of water.

CONCLUSION

Initially, the three terms to be brought forward in this essay were being-looked-at, fascia and wetsuiting. However, after careful consideration, wetsuiting was replaced by sealing. Wetsuiting, deriving from the term wetsuit, is an extension, a doing of the neoprene suit which shields humans against cold water (amongst other things) and thus allows for submerging. In my research, wetsuiting refers to an in-between state, a medium or method through which kinship with the non-human can be established. Nevertheless, this method is part of a larger aim, namely that of sealing the trench between human and non-human. Therefore, sealing was chosen as the third term instead, as wetsuiting is one of the various methods used in this investigation rather than its cornerstone. In addition, sealing comprises both the action (closing something securely, referring to the trench) and the non-human (in this case, the aquatic and terrestrial animal, with whom an interwovenness is to be highlighted), rendering an additional terminological layer in the middle somewhat redundant.

Moreover, the terms within this essay should be understood as incomplete lexicon entries. The reason is that their inherent meaning and their relationship with each other, as well as to my wider research, might reshape over time. They might themselves reshape and become different words altogether, opening different angles; an example here would be focusing on looker rather than being-looked-at. Also, being-looked-at, could already be expanded into being-called, placing the focus on the auditory rather than the visual. To broaden the scope even more, being-looked-at might be disengaging from zoic qualities such as looking or hearing altogether, building a wider sensitivity towards encompassing, for example, found objects.

To conclude with a disclaimer, nets, specifically fishing nets, can harm seals, for example, by them getting stuck in them or parts wrapping around their body. This awareness assists in developing the sealing practice with care, especially when working with fascial nets.

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