[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":705},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-transcript-body":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"description":690,"extension":691,"meta":692,"navigation":700,"path":701,"seo":702,"stem":703,"__hash__":704},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Ftranscript-body.md","Transcript from podcast Episode 3: Body",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":686},"minimark",[9,13,16,19,22,25,28,31,33,36,39,42,45,47,50,52,55,57,60,63,66,68,71,73,76,79,81,84,87,90,93,95,98,101,104,107,110,112,115,118,120,123,125,128,130,133,135,138,141,143,146,149,152,155,157,160,162,165,168,171,173,176,178,181,183,186,189,192,195,197,200,203,206,208,211,214,217,219,222,224,227,229,232,234,237,240,242,245,248,250,253,256,259,261,264,266,269,272,274,276,278,281,284,287,290,292,295,298,300,303,305,308,311,313,316,318,321,323,326,328,331,333,335,337,340,343,345,348,350,353,356,358,361,364,366,369,372,374,377,379,382,384,387,389,392,394,397,399,402,404,407,409,412,415,417,420,422,425,428,431,433,436,438,441,443,446,448,451,453,456,458,461,463,466,468,471,473,476,478,481,483,486,488,491,493,496,499,501,504,507,510,512,515,517,520,522,524,527,529,532,534,537,539,542,544,547,549,552,554,557,560,563,566,569,571,574,577,579,582,584,587,590,593,596,598,601,603,606,608,611,613,616,618,621,624,627,629,632,634,637,639,642,644,647,649,652,654,657,660,663,665,668,670,673,675,678,681,683],[10,11,12],"p",{},"Razorsmile:",[10,14,15],{},"OK, welcome to our session of the Freudian Spaceship Podcasts, looking at concepts. And this particular concept we're going to look at is the concept of the body.  And one of the things I want to kind of first just put in the air is that in the methodology that we use, the kind of schizoanalytic, Fanonian schizoanalytic methodology that me and Eric are trying to work with, in some ways the body is a curious concept because it doesn't quite fit into the way it's often theorized. And there seem to be three kind of dominant ways.  which the body is often theorized or come across inside theory, one in terms of objects, object relations or just object, objectivity, objects, relations of all thoughts. The other, so one in the body as an object. The other is the body as an idea of some kind. And there's even a bit of that in Deleuze very clearly at certain points where there's a kind of an idea of the body. And then the other is the image of the body, whether that comes from Lacan or whether that comes from...  a whole range of other places. And a lot of these discussions are still very much often within a kind of representational domain or problems of representation. They're trying to break out a little bit. But often within schizoanalytic kind of practice, we're looking almost immediately at sub-representational domains. And so we're kind of interested in what goes on before that. And one of the reasons we're quite often we're interested in people like Stern is because of this kind of way in which there are sub-representational structures that are kind of developed and that we're interested in.  And so that's kind of, in a sense, part of the background of how we might encounter the body, which is a curious concept in our work. And the other kind of point I wanted to just sort of, it's kind of parallel to that. So we often have in discourse at the moment talk about body as experienced, some kind of lived experience of the body. And that's talked about in particular kind of ways, and that's very useful and interesting in many discourses, both politically and socially.",[10,17,18],{},"But again, there's a kind of stepping back to a kind of notion of conditions of that experience. What are the conditions of those real experiences that people have with their bodies? Often when people talk about lived experience, it's very easy for that lived experience to be singularized, universalized, not really be complexified. So what are the conditions of real experience? So this is a Delirium kind of question. What are the actual conditions of real experience of the body? So.  It's with some of those thoughts in mind in terms of how I might approach the body or me and Eric might approach the body in our project that I kind of I'm going to kind of intervene into this conversation. So in a sense, that's what I'm going to be doing through this. But what I want to do, first of all, is just to have a little bit of a go around where you kind of just tell us a little bit about who you are and why you're interested in the body, but how first of all, how you kind of use the concept of the body in your everyday life at the moment. And we'll kind of begin there if that's OK with everybody.  And so I'm going to begin on that go around using my screen, if that's okay. So I can begin with Blake.",[10,20,21],{},"Blake Byles:",[10,23,24],{},"Hi, I'm all thanks for having me. Um, yeah, I'm a trainee psychotherapist at Goldsmiths. Um, Eric invited me on here. Um, and my relationship with the body is. Yeah. Something I'm very much thinking a lot about at the moment. Um, I'm a, I'm a, I would characterize myself as a in my head kind of person. And I'm kind of.  discoverer rediscovering my body. I have indigenous ancestry and that's my identity with that and a multicultural world, a post-colonial world is part of my research at the moment. And so the connections between mind, body, spirit is something that I'm really interested in and I'm happy to be here and talk about it.",[10,26,27],{},"Max:",[10,29,30],{},"Thank you.",[10,32,12],{},[10,34,35],{},"Sorry, right, Morrigan, can I ask you to just chime in here?",[10,37,38],{},"So it's a little bit about yourself and...",[10,40,41],{},"Morrigan:",[10,43,44],{},"Yeah, can you hear me?",[10,46,12],{},[10,48,49],{},"Yes.",[10,51,41],{},[10,53,54],{},"Okay. Well, I think my connection with the body is like, it feels like it's gendered for me. I've had three kids. I've gone through the menopause. Yeah, there's definitely an element of it which feels like it's connected to an idea of women.  My connection with the body is also is through experience. I'm a chronic asthmatic. You know, when you can't breathe, this creates a certain connection with the body. And also it's, my background in kind of thinking about the body is quite often around work. For example, Elaine Scary.  who wrote about pain and the making and unmaking of the world. So yeah, I have that kind of, those kind of connections to the body.",[10,56,12],{},[10,58,59],{},"Rita, could I ask you to just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you encounter the concept at the moment?",[10,61,62],{},"Rita Chouhan:",[10,64,65],{},"Okay, yeah, thank you. Yeah, I kind of see my body. Initially, I was an optometrist, so I kind of looked at my body more physiologically and anatomically built up the cells. And really on that level until now I'm training as a psychotherapist student at the moment. And I see it quite differently now as  the mind-body connection, and also my connection to race, because I am a British Asian, and how that's impacted me. And my relationship with my ancestry as well, about transgenerational trauma, I think that's a big interest I have now, looking at that and how that impacts the body.  Also, um  There's loads of aspects of it really, because I've got a placement at an eating disorder clinic now, and I'm thinking of the impact of food on the body, not just physiologically, but how clients deal with the fact of food and the control and the underlying emotions underneath the food and how that impacts the body. And it's not...  just the food, but the relationships they have outside, family, and how that affects the body as well. So it's quite complex and it's very interesting how all these little things interact.",[10,67,12],{},[10,69,70],{},"Max, could I ask you to just give a little intro to yourself and your relationship to the concept?",[10,72,27],{},[10,74,75],{},"Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Max. I'm a psychotherapist. I just qualified from Goldsmiths. It seems to be a little group of us in here tonight. My relationship to the concept of the body is multi-faceted. I am transgender, so my experience of my body is through...  through changing it. And I sort of think of myself as a man of woman experience. So like living in the world in a female body for a very long time and how the world interacted with me in that way and how the world interacts with me now, like it all creates sort of a strata from which I experience relationships in society and myself. The other thing that I think is very interesting for me is  was a psychotherapist, I was a sex worker and so my body was a side of labor in a very intimate way and I guess I'm interested in how that affects the body somatically, how it affects the body as a nervous structure, how it affects the body as a side of labor but the labor reflects things that you would want to do.  like for your own gratification, and how the site of the body is split then.",[10,77,78],{},"I think that's probably where I'm staying with that.",[10,80,12],{},[10,82,83],{},"Thanks very much. Yumuna, can I ask you to just introduce yourself and tell us a little about your relationship to the concept of the body?",[10,85,86],{},"Yumna:",[10,88,89],{},"Hi, thank you. Yeah, so I'm actually not qualified. I'm still training at Goldsmiths, wrapping a few things up. So I'm not going to be qualified for a while, but I'm training to be a therapist. And actually, the time at Goldsmiths is what actually introduced me to my body again for the first time, because I just feel like, as a South Asian woman from a culture that used to sort of  where the body and the mind were interconnected and the soul were all interconnected. But then after colonization, we kind of separated those entities. I was kind of on the way with intellectualization and then spending time at Colesmiths with some of my classmates and in class with Eric and another one of our professors, I became more aware of somatization. So for a long time I was at war with my body. I was separated, I separated it from my mind. And  I'm so glad I learned that in the past two years, because at the moment, we're witnessing a genocide in Gaza. And I like a lot of us, we've been forcing ourselves to witness it because it's the very least we can do. And I'm noticing my body respond to what I'm witnessing. I have pinched nerves, I have pain in my lower back. Sometimes I can't walk, sometimes I can't breathe.",[10,91,92],{},"I think that I'm collecting data in that way for people who might not exist later on because of extermination. And I'm also noticing collectively, you know, what Fanon spoke about a lot in terms of what we collect and how as a broader community, we're there to bear witness.  for each other and to fight for each other. And I think it's gonna inform my practice as a therapist in a really big way, because I was looking towards liberation and collective liberation and collective resilience. And in witnessing this genocide, I'm sort of drawing a lot of connections and conclusions finally as to how to be a liberation therapist. And it has a lot to do with.  somatization in the body and collective memory in the soul.",[10,94,12],{},[10,96,97],{},"Riyadh, can I ask you to just briefly introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your concept, your current use of the concept of the body.",[10,99,100],{},"Eric, can I ask you to just tell us who you are and how you're using the concept of the body at the moment?",[10,102,103],{},"Eric:",[10,105,106],{},"Okay, well I'm a friend of Matt's and I've had the privilege of encountering everyone else in this group. I suppose when I was in my twenties I overdosed on some substances and I was having flashbacks, what people might call psychotic.  had the sense of kind of leaving my body in these strange ideas. And what was so central to me was to actually just to somehow come back to my body, to ground myself in my body. And that was kind of like a turning point in my life was just this profound sense of as long as I can somehow be connected to my body and allow my body to be home to different affect, sensations, thoughts and just trust it.  there will be a sense of life, there will be a sense of continuity. But how incredibly difficult that is. Then later on in my work, and I've spent a lot of my work working around violence, and there was very much the sense in which a lot of people could take their bodies for granted, but a lot of people who were subjected to violence one way or another,",[10,108,109],{},"maybe in terms of structural violence who didn't eat every day. And they would tell me strategies in terms of what you do if you don't eat every day. You sleep a lot. That's a way of trying to trick the body in terms of hunger. So you just try to stay asleep. But also, yeah, just the sense of people who in a sense can't take their, whether the organs of the body, so to speak, are very loud.  and make lots of noise. And where there's the daily reminder sometimes for some people in terms of the violence that they've been subjected to. In terms of their bodies become a reminder of it, whereas other people have the luxury of, for myself, I love the luxury of disappearing in my body when Eric ceases to exist, where I'm doing exercise or something, or it's just a fantastic sensation. But a lot of people don't have that luxury.  Just maybe the last comment, just observing my brother's struggle, my brother has a learning disability and he is noticeably different to what the term might be. I don't know if it's able bodied or unable bodied and he's noticeably different and people immediately fix on his body and just how in a sense so many people have their bodies fixed.  in that sense they don't have the luxury of just being invisible. That's been so relevant in my observations and experiences around the body.",[10,111,12],{},[10,113,114],{},"Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do the same thing for myself, after which it's going to be kind of up to you what you want to talk about next. So if something has come to mind or you want to speak about something already, whilst I'm talking just raise your hand so that you know, so I know that you want to say something, otherwise I'll just let people have a bit of a pause. So I'm, my name's Matt Lee, I usually go by the name Raise a Smile when I'm doing work.  And that comes from a magical background because I'm a philosopher, but I'm also a sorcerer. And so my body relationship, the way I have a relationship to the concept of a body is very much informed by sorcery. It's very much informed by practice in where the body is your central tool. It's what you do things with and in and to. And more importantly, it's when you've kind of to use Eric's lovely face, when you've been out of the body.  There are various ways of doing that from extreme to sort of relatively moderate, which is a central practice of a lot of sorcery to sort of rearrange the relationship to their body, an out of body kind of practice. You have to then bring it back in again. And there's a very widespread practice called grounding. It's used in sorcery, it's used all over the place. But one of the things that's interesting there is for me, the body is the Earth.  before everything else, because when I need to come back to my body, I don't come back to my body, I come back to the earth. I mean, this is a central practice of sorceries. That's how you kind of come back into your body. But if you were to actually talk about the body itself, it would be almost as it were, the earth itself. And so I find sometimes when I am dealing with theory, a very, very anthropocentric kind of presupposition or assumption or  kind of border to discussions of the body. And so I like to think that that's in a sense, a kind of something like almost a bad abstraction. The body is almost like a bad abstraction. Physicality is there, the earth is there, but there's these other things that we have relationships to and somehow through the body, but the body is not the relationship itself. So it's a very curious kind of relationship I have to the concept, because I don't quite like it.",[10,116,117],{},"in a way, I kind of would rather it wasn't there and we could do without the concept of the body. I think that would probably be my most extreme formulation, probably not completely reasonable one. But anyway, so now I'm going to ask people for contributions. And what kind of comes to mind? How are you kind of formulating a thought at the moment?",[10,119,103],{},[10,121,122],{},"Can I just introduce one idea which is the one idea we have is visible and invisible bodies, but the other idea which maybe might help us to think is untouchable bodies. I'm thinking of the concept of the untouchables and I just wondered if that would be a useful concept in terms of the world we're living in and in terms of suffering. I just want to throw it out there.",[10,124,12],{},[10,126,127],{},"Yumla.",[10,129,62],{},[10,131,132],{},"I think.",[10,134,86],{},[10,136,137],{},"Yeah, actually on that point, we've been watching a somewhat very actually riveting, slightly dramatic melodramatic Indian TV series on Amazon called Made in Heaven. And it's about two friends who, one being a dark skinned Indian woman and one being a gay Indian man in hiding.  hiding his sexuality and they plan weddings for the richest and most upper caste people in Indian society in Delhi, which is specifically known as, you know, quite a segregated society. Anyways, in one episode, each wedding they do, they sort of introduce a societal issue in India. One being a woman whose ancestors were Dalit or untouchable.  and her wanting to have a wedding ceremony according to the Dalit or Buddhist traditions and her Hindu parents, her Hindu in-laws not wanting that. Another woman actually getting sick because she was injecting sort of serums into her face to become morphine complexion for her wedding. And then there was one where a very beautiful ex-India  ex-Miss India was marrying a very influential man and he was physically abusing her. Everybody knew about it and they just let the wedding continue. And at the end, the narrator of the story said something which is that the body remembers so that the soul never forgets. And I think body and memory, especially now in terms of what we're witnessing, in terms of what we always witness on especially the bodies that are attacked and violated.  and who's doing the remembering and how we do the remembering, it's all stored in the body as far as I can see, because culturally, we've all kind of been taught to suppress and repress, especially in Western culture, and to be focused inwardly as individuals and lose the collective, because I think that there's a fear of what's being uncovered. So yeah, I think...",[10,139,140],{},"the link between body and memory is even stronger than between the mind and memory.",[10,142,12],{},[10,144,145],{},"Riyadh and then Rita.",[10,147,148],{},"Riyadh, did you want to say something?",[10,150,151],{},"Can you hear me?",[10,153,154],{},"Can you hear me? No, I don't think he can.",[10,156,86],{},[10,158,159],{},"Is this my cue to start saying terrible things?",[10,161,12],{},[10,163,164],{},"No, we can't hear you, Riyadh.",[10,166,167],{},"Bit closer to the bike. Come closer, come closer.",[10,169,170],{},"Just come closer to your, yeah, we can hear you, Riyadh. Just come closer, be right, nice and close. There we are.  Yes.",[10,172,86],{},[10,174,175],{},"We won't bite.",[10,177,12],{},[10,179,180],{},"Rita.",[10,182,62],{},[10,184,185],{},"Yeah, I'm actually an untouchable by the caste system in India. And you can tell that I am an untouchable by my surname. So in a way, it's like Eric was saying, it's visible and it's invisible. To some people, it's invisible and they wouldn't know if they didn't know the Indian caste system. Yet it's...  very visible to people who are Indian. And it does, it feels sometimes it feels your body is contaminated like.  The word untouchable makes you feel that.",[10,187,188],{},"a complete outsider outside of your body as well that it's not livable inside.",[10,190,191],{},"It's all that I sometimes think of my mum and I think about how you. How my mother was pregnant with me and how that. All those feelings marinate in the womb and how you carry that through and how that affects you and. And not only how the caste system in India.  sort of translates when my parents came over to this country, how that translates into working class and how that affects the body and the mind and the spirit and how that translates into other areas of your life as well, where you do feel like Eric was saying about feeling visible but invisible at the same time, about being brown as well.  It's like...  Something that a France fan said about...",[10,193,194],{},"you can be a person who's brown where people just see you and all of a sudden everyone will project whatever they want on you, whereas if you're Jewish...  people give you a second chance because if you don't, if they don't recognize the features of you, you are invisible to a certain extent, but being brown, you're visible straight away. And also people that are untouchable are slightly a little bit darker as well, because you do low paid jobs. So you're in the heat all the time. So in that way in India, you're recognized. So there's a sense of also,  internalize racism in there as well, in terms of your body, because you try and...  to try and whiten yourself so you bleach yourself. And so there's all these different factors that you try to abuse your body to try and fit in. If that makes sense.",[10,196,12],{},[10,198,199],{},"Did I see you Max? Indicator speak, yes? And then Eric.",[10,201,202],{},"you will need to unmute yourself, Max.",[10,204,205],{},"There we go.",[10,207,27],{},[10,209,210],{},"Thank you. I lost my button. When I put... I lost my button.  So, Dorita, you got me thinking about the ways in which we modify but occasionally abuse our bodies to fit in. And this has been just on my mind this week. I have a mirror in my bedroom and it's like a horizontal mirror so I can see myself from the waist up and I think he's looking cracking.",[10,212,213],{},"But then I have another rare that sits beside my window and I can see my hips and I found myself... I'm not even sure what was the train of thought that led me there. I found myself googling, how much is liposuction in the UK? Which is just not really... It's not really something that I'd ever really given a lot of thought to, but it's been just... It's been creeping into my...  unconsciousness and then like into my consciousness. And I think something that's really been present in my life is the going from highly visible when I was living as a woman to the turning point when I became visibly trans enough, cut my hair off, that I was no longer highly feminine and I became like instantly invisible in a way that I thought was incredibly freeing.  and",[10,215,216],{},"It really surprised me how under the radar I was. And it has and it hasn't shifted. Like it's shifted in that I've become more and more masculine as time and testosterone goes on. And so I become more visible in some ways, like people take me seriously a lot more often. People listen to what I have to say.  I don't have to be quite so loud, I'm a lot more gentle, just because that's, I don't have to be any other way, but in other aspects of my life, so like generally speaking, I'm fairly queer, fairly gay, and going, being like catapulted into the world of gay masculinity has been a real shock because there is such a focus on the body, and I don't have one of the main features that is a focus.  of the body for that community. I don't have a penis. I'm unlikely to ever have a penis. And it interacts with my feelings of self-worth, and I do some sort of complex mathematics of, well, what do I need to do to my body to make up for my lack of penis?",[10,218,12],{},[10,220,221],{},"Eric, can I... you are looking like you are indicating to speak.",[10,223,103],{},[10,225,226],{},"Yeah, there was a time when I was, well spent quite a few years working in sex work, and my mom had her dream. She said to me, can't you get sex workers to be working in hospitals? Because there's some people who are never going to get touched. And she used to say one of the things which was a curse about aging, she said, you just don't get touched. So I was thinking when I was using the expression.  untouchable. I mean there's the metaphoric dimension of topics that we don't want to touch. And we saw, I mean we see this in the media portrayal in terms of what's happening at the moment around Gaza. But I think we see this in other ways at a concrete level where there's in a sense bodies just not touched.  I just wanted to throw that into the conversation at an actual lived level, the untouched body as well.",[10,228,12],{},[10,230,231],{},"Yumna.",[10,233,86],{},[10,235,236],{},"Yeah, I think what everyone's said up to now points to the very obvious fact that bodies are political. And in many ways, we express our political existence, whether we want to or not, in how small we make our bodies, in how we hide our bodies, we hide our complexions. And also because, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people are just feeling really dysregulated at the moment because of  political situation, not in the fact that we are witnessing a genocide and beyond that, existing in capitalism is dysregulating. And usually the only thing we think we can control is the appearance of our bodies. And I mean, I felt that way, I felt that way a lot lately where, you know, whenever I see something really distressing, I just go and put  play with my makeup and put makeup on my face and then take selfies to see how I look from different angles because it's the only thing that I can do to control my appearance and my performance and my representation. And there was one other thing. So yeah, so the body is political. We express our political existence in our bodies. There was one other thought, but it's lost my lost it.  Welcome back to it. Ah, sorry, I just remembered, since I started at Goldsmiths, I've been kind of like the angry brown lady shouting at everyone. And I thought that I can only say that if I'm also aware of my own privilege and I try to be aware of my privilege as much as I can, it's an ongoing battle because sometimes I get blinders. But I know I have middle-class privilege.  Another thing that I thought that I had, which I said a lot to a lot of people, is that I thought I was white passing, and I thought that I was afforded a lot of privilege. I just recently found out that that's a delusion, that I'm actually not white passing on any planet. Maybe like the most southern part of Greece, perhaps.",[10,238,239],{},"For a long time, I was walking around with this imagined privilege of being white passing and it did affect how I conducted myself and the mental gymnastics I was doing in my interaction with people. And on one hand, it gave me the confidence of a white woman. And on the other hand, it gave me the guilt of a privileged woman. And yeah, it was just an interesting realization to come to. And I'm not really sure what to do with my brown self now.",[10,241,12],{},[10,243,244],{},"Morrigan.",[10,246,247],{},"You don't need to unmute yourself, there we go.",[10,249,41],{},[10,251,252],{},"I have been sitting here for about 20 minutes wondering whether to say this and I'm pretty sure Matt knows what I'm about to say. And it does relate a bit to what Eric was saying about the sense of being untouchable and how certain things are embodied. A big chunk of my family are Israeli, they're Jews.  In the current situation, clearly, this as a political person, this puts me in a really strange situation where I don't belong anywhere. Of the chunk of Jewish people, about half of them are now refugees somewhere in Europe. They've left.  Israel and are living in Europe and I don't actually know where they are. They're not living in Europe. They're staying in Europe",[10,254,255],{},"the body as a political thing.  In terms of the way that the body is expressed in language, is really, really complicated when I find at the moment where I don't have the language to express how I feel. I don't have something clean to say to people and I can't exist on any side of this at all. Yeah.  And the odd thing about that is that war is completely embodied. That there is no reason for it apart from to damage the body, you know? And the thing with damage and the body is that it's, it almost like has to be visible because the language cannot account for the war. If you see what I mean. I'm not explaining this very well.  And to go to something that Eric because I feel very emotional about it to go to something that Eric was saying about the untouchable body  I, for one reason or another, I had to get a statement from my older sister about my experience of childhood. And I was shocked when I read the statement, because it was saying that I would not be touched as a child. I would not be hugged. I would not be held. I don't have any memory of this. So in terms of the body holding that memory.",[10,257,258],{},"The nearest I can get to it is still not liking to be touched at all. Keep away from me. Or the permissions or the consents that are needed for me to experience touch when we are told, when we are told, when we are, the construction is that we should want to be touched. And so to...  To not live in that world where the touch is welcomed is quite odd because it's seen as utterly dysfunctional rather than just another way of being really. So that's my confused contribution.",[10,260,12],{},[10,262,263],{},"Blake, did you want to come in at all?",[10,265,21],{},[10,267,268],{},"Yeah, thanks. I was wondering where I would place some of the thoughts I'd had, but Morrigan's given me a good inroad there. From the start, I picked up on what both you, Matt and Eric were talking about being out of the body. And it made me think of some quite profound experience I've had with psychedelics, particularly one.  One encounter about 10 years ago now, I was on my bed at home with Salvia Divinorum, which is quite a fast acting, short lasting psychedelic. I had my wife, she was my girlfriend at the time, kind of trip sitting, watching over me. And I...  I inhaled it and it happens really quickly. I was lying on the bed and then like this, the time and space, the cosmos, like tore open in front of me, in front of my chest. And I whooshed through to the next dimension. And it was all blinding white and you know, like my ears were ringing and as my eyes and my ears came to, I heard like a cacophony of birdsong.  intense greenery came into my vision. I was standing, I was looking down at my feet, which I was barefoot with the richest red, brown earth and greenery all around me. I was in a bush, a forest. I was holding a large banana leaf type thing with food on it. And I was standing next to a grass hut and I could sense that people were watching me.  And I looked over and there was three or four aunties, we would say like from the indigenous context, you know, people from our group. And they were looking at me and they said like in a language that I don't know, but I understood like, come on sleepy head, you know, like I was kind of following them with the food, helping them out and supposed to go to this hut. And I was just so present and so lucid in that space. And I kind of got...",[10,270,271],{},"the terror, you know, when you trip and you kind of have gone a bit in the deep end. And it felt so real and I felt so at home. And I was like, you know, is this the classic thing? Like, hang on, have I just been daydreaming this life where we are right now? And I live in that world. And so it was that flip side. And...  One thing I felt was like a real sense of belonging and being seen by them, you know, like I was there doing the work with them. I was a part of it. And that in some ways that felt why that was the more like real world. And eventually I kind of like made my way back to this reality. I came back to the body on the sofa and like the scar of the cosmos kind of sealed up.  Um, like 10 years later, the fact that like, I'm like working with my indigenous identity, my, uh, queer identity, like gender roles and that type of thing. It's like no surprise to me that I had that trip, that vision, that transportation. And so this thing about being like out of the body is really, um, something to me because it's like, can we exist outside the body?  And that moment, like I was outside of my body, but I was even more of myself than I had felt like in a long time. And so I could say I was out of my body, or like traveling into outer space, psychedelically, right? But I was traveling in inner space as well, you know? So there's this thing about, it's linked back to what Morgan was saying about the untouchable parts. Like we can be untouchable from other people, but we can't be untouchable from other people.  we can also be untouchable to ourselves as well. And so that for me, like looking back, that psychedelic experience, I was able to get out or into the body and reach a part of myself that was untouchable to me as well. So yeah, I just wanted to share that experience.",[10,273,12],{},[10,275,180],{},[10,277,62],{},[10,279,280],{},"Oh yeah, it's what Blake said actually, when you said you were seen by your aunties and I'm thinking about myself there where I felt I was never seen. Maybe that came from being an untouchable and how Eric talks a lot about being frozen, that part of you that freezes and maybe I'm just thinking what that does to your psyche when that  part of you freezes and you don't know how to be touched and you allow people that shouldn't touch you, touch you because you don't know the boundary, you lose that.  that boundary of your skin that you have in a way, or that boundary you have with other people, the interrelationships where...",[10,282,283],{},"And when you allow other people in that shouldn't be in, that you have this outer body experience as well with them.",[10,285,286],{},"and you can't live in that body because it's too dangerous to do that.  and.  So.",[10,288,289],{},"in a psychic way, not being allowed to be touched and how that affects you physically as well as mentally and how that can traumatize the body.  That's all I wanted to say.",[10,291,103],{},[10,293,294],{},"Probably the main thing or one of the main things I learned from working with torture survivors was that violence is not having a sense of mental and or physical space into which you can retreat That it's a sense of homelessness where there's sometimes no mental and or physical space into which you can retreat Which is obviously so applicable to what's happening in Gaza at this moment",[10,296,297],{},"and in a sense where somebody becomes alien to themselves, where they become alien to themselves, where they become so identified with just the trauma, because one of the other things I learned from working with torture survivors, what people would say to me, oh he's in a terrible working with torture, and I'd say well no I work with a human being in which one of the experiences is  torture but there's a whole lot of other experiences. There's somebody's kid, there's all these other dimensions, but often that person themselves forgets those dimensions. Those dimensions become alien to them. And the reason I'm saying this is if there's one expression or one of the most powerful expressions for me from thinkers is Fanon's expression about can I make me a body that can always ask questions?  And the way I translate that is, make me a body that can always move. To question is to have movement. It's the question to be able to push up against something. And if you can't move, you can't, in a sense, connect to other bodies or be impacted by other bodies. If you are fixed, you become absolutely isolated, atomized.",[10,299,12],{},[10,301,302],{},"Max, you want to comment on that?",[10,304,27],{},[10,306,307],{},"Yeah, I'm coming in to bring a few threads together here actually. I'm thinking about reading this book by Avgi Sakatopoulou and she talks about this idea of limit consent and this is sort of centered around this idea that there's an inherent opacity of the self that we can't really know ourselves until we encounter ourselves.  So this idea of like, can you consent to something if you don't know what is going to happen, if you don't know who you're going to be in that moment, is consent something that is there fictionalized to make us feel better about our interactions. And, you know, I'm sort of thinking about what you were saying there, Rita, about when you...",[10,309,310],{},"when you allow people to touch you that like maybe necessarily shouldn't touch you. And I'm thinking about like life in sex work in particular, you know, you're there in sex work because it's the side of your labor. And you know, I'm, I was a sex worker for a very long time. So I understand sort of ins and outs of this in a lot of ways. But would I...  would I allow this touch to happen if I wasn't? I needed to make the money. If maybe society was structured in a way that I could earn money in a different way, probably not, no. And like what then happens to the body and what then happens to the self? Like where do you go? And I think that, you know, disassociation is something that really is a feature of sex work for a lot of sex workers. But  And I sort of hinted at my thought around this in the beginning, what then happens to the body and the body's sexuality for itself when sexuality is a side of labour. And I'm not sure that I have an answer there, but the opacity of self, when I read that, it really struck a chord for me,  I don't think that I really understood that I had any sort of genders for it until my late twenties, so I've been really met face on with the fact that I am totally opaque to myself and there is just so much that is unknowable about my body to me.",[10,312,12],{},[10,314,315],{},"Rita, do you want to come back in?",[10,317,62],{},[10,319,320],{},"Yeah, thank you. I think it's what you said, Max, and what Eric said about, you were saying, it's kind of paradoxical, it feels, because at one part you feel you're homeless, because it doesn't feel safe to be in your body, yet, so you want to dissociate, but at the same time, your body is a haven, so you're trapped between which to pick.  And then the actual boundary, your skin, if you think of the skin as a boundary or is it the boundary with your interpersonal relationships, it becomes, like you said, quite opaque and quite blurry that where does all this fit in?",[10,322,12],{},[10,324,325],{},"Max. Yeah, come back in Max.",[10,327,27],{},[10,329,330],{},"I have this little joke with my sex worker friends that have a theory that being a sex worker gives you fibromyalgia. Because most sex workers that I know have fibromyalgia. And I've actually talked about this at length and it is a joke but at the same time, when you're involved in...  in that kind of work, often there is like consent violations and like, you know, there's risky business going on. And I think that particularly for women, you might have just because of the society that we live in, you know, and a standard number of boundary trans aggressions that you will experience throughout your life. And like that is bad enough. But when you're a sex worker, they sort of get condensed into a few years. And  I'm thinking about like what happens to the body under this kind of repeated stress and that's just sex work, that's not even talking about genocide, that's not talking about war, that's not talking about torture. Like when there is nowhere to go apart from somewhere tucked away in your psyche and your body is still there, the body remembers and what does it do with that information?",[10,332,12],{},[10,334,231],{},[10,336,86],{},[10,338,339],{},"I totally get what you're saying, Max, and I agree, but on the other hand, I feel like when you talk about the boundary violations of being in the line of sex work, you are talking about torture, you are talking about genocide, you are talking about the various violations of marginalized people who are, because of the way they presented to the world, are being targeted.  And I don't think it's any coincidence that the people who are now most vocal in the pro-Palestine movement at this very moment are the ones who've experienced some kind of violation. So it is disabled people, it is trans people, it's like people from the queer community. And I think in that sense, the answer to your question is when you are dissociating from your body because of the bullying and the violence that it experiences,  the place where you go is the collective body. And this is what I'm hoping at the very least comes out of this because there's a lot of internalized self-hatred that comes from being a marginalized person. Indians especially are the most racist, colonized, patriarchal, misogynist group of people. They find it very comfortable to be adjacent to the powerful.  instead of embracing their marginalization and seeing the power in being part of that community. And so like in my family, you know, there's a lot of anti-queer, like severely anti-LGBTQ and just horrible misogyny. And I mean, I'm hoping I haven't spoken to them much. A lot of them are in South Africa, but I would love to know what they think of the fact that the people that they would usually discriminate against and judge and sort of...  make sure their children don't turn out to be, other ones who are fighting the scores with more, with the most purest intentions. And that's the collective body. And.",[10,341,342],{},"If we can overcome our internalized self-hatred that we project onto people who don't deserve it and we allow ourselves to be embraced by this collective body so that when some are resisting, some are resting, when others are resting, others are picking up, they're doing the prayer, they're doing the feeding, they're doing what... that's what liberation is and that's where the resilience comes from and that's the intangible, invisible, greater body.  that I'm seeing come out of this movement at this very moment.",[10,344,12],{},[10,346,347],{},"Yes, Blake.",[10,349,21],{},[10,351,352],{},"Yeah, what Jovanna is saying makes me think back to some of the stuff that I'm interested in with my research at the moment. Following on from some of my Indigenous research was like some of the intergroup oppression. Like some of the things I've looked at where the culture is trying to be, people are working really hard and making good progress at trying to revitalise an Indigenous identity.  can fetishise conservative thinking because it's going back to traditions and things like that. And so I'm kind of looking at the queerness of indigeneity at the moment because of pushing back against that exact thing. How can we express our indigeneity, but bypassing some of that conservativism, which obviously can come with some of the kind of echoes of colonial  oppression through the Christian perspective, the Western perspective, the kind of hetero-patriarchy that comes along with all of that. Some of the stuff that we had in the group chat before we recorded this, I was looking at the Muhanram, Paterai, Fanon, and that stuff was really interesting where it talks about the native, or the term, or the idea about being native.  kind of locking people in. And it makes me think about what Eric was saying about the ability to move.",[10,354,355],{},"There's a big thing, I don't know if it's the same for every Māori tribe, but there's definitely this with my tribe back home, where it's a big thing on being there. You know, if you want to be involved, you have to be there, you have to be, you know, feet on the ground and really get to be a part of it. And in my research, I was looking at some of that, like, what is it to be Māori? And a big part of it was  Being able to sidestep the cultural practices and stuff and actually just connect with the spirituality, the philosophy of, you know, being connected with the creation of time and space with the Earth Mother, Sky Father, that type of thing. You know, the genealogy from them to us can actually bypass a lot of the cultural stuff, the tradition stuff. So yeah, when I talk, when I read about the Phenonians stuff about  you know, the terms of native locking in, it kind of seems really myopic to think like, oh, yes, you have an indigenous identity, but it's actually can only be contained within this territory. Like surely like the earth, mother of sky father are much bigger than that. So yeah, those are just thoughts have been going around my head at the moment about the body being able to move or not being able to move or not being able to return to.  you know, that place of belonging. I think that's actually what a big part of my research was, was about like, how can I feel like I'm a part of this group, but be able to move around and criticize it, you know, to feel like I identify and belong, but I want to be on the margins of it. I want to stay on the edge so I can criticize it.",[10,357,12],{},[10,359,360],{},"Jumla, did you want to come in? Anyone else if I didn't see your hands? I'm okay. You didn't, is that right? No. You're okay. So I've been thinking as people have been talking about the, and I don't want to over-characterise it, but the kind of predominance of this relationship to connection and the way bodies kind of enable, disable, produce, destroy connections. And it seems to me that that, you know, in a sense is",[10,362,363],{},"It's a crucial way of thinking about the body. And as Yumda pointed out, it kind of inevitably politically has these enormous political implications once we begin to think about the way these connections form and reform. Often, as we've been talking about with trauma or with some kind of trauma relationship or with some sort of process of having to learn the adaptive development process that's central to Freudianism.  psychology, looking at how these bodies have learnt to touch, learnt to connect, learnt not to, learnt to dissociate. And what I would like us maybe to just turn to next, if it's not too drastic, is, and it was mentioned briefly, is the other side of the body, the side of joy, the side of the ecstatic moment, the side of physicality, being embodied, feeling embodied, in a sense almost to the point at which  Connection no longer matters. You know, that connection element can sort of slide away a little bit because the connection has been made. And whether that feels like a relevant relationship you have to your body, or whether this is a romantic description of some kind of, you know, naturalistic paradise. Max.",[10,365,27],{},[10,367,368],{},"I have loads to say about this. I'll give you a little anecdote to start us off. I had top surgery, so I had my double mastectomy about a year and a half ago. And I had this girlfriend when I was a teenager and she was able to like make her boobs jump like by moving her pecs. And I thought like, God, you know, it's so funny how some people are able to do that and other people aren't.  Um, because I was never able to do that. And I tried, I was like, I want to be able to do that, it's really cool. And after I had my surgery, it was a few weeks later, I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror with the light on. And like, I was looking at my pecs and then it moved. And I, I like, I screamed, I was like, you're not going to believe what's going to happen, what's after happening. So I ran up to the living room and I was like, look at this. And uh, had...  had gained some sort of psychic connection, physical connection to my pecs and I can move them now. I would show you but it would be inappropriate. But that was just, it was such an embodied thing that I really didn't like my chest before and I really like it now. But it was something about literally getting the weight off my chest that allowed me to connect with my body in a way that I had never done before.  And since, you know, the transgender body that I'm working with right now has opened up lots of ways of like, ecstatically experiencing myself, like I have genital sensation where before there was none. And I think, you know, that trauma was involved in that. I was able to shed some of that with the transformation that I've had.",[10,370,371],{},"I've also... I can dance now in a way that I never could. I think there's like a little bit more fluency with my limbs and I described this early on in my transition when I started to take testosterone of, I feel like I used to live in tight squished ball in my chest but now that I'm having the correct hormone imbalance I feel like my body is full of me. I like I've spread out into my limbs.  and I'm aware of myself from my hair to my toes in a way that I didn't exist before. So I don't think that it's a totally romanticised matte, I think, sometimes, that there is ecstatic human existence there.",[10,373,12],{},[10,375,376],{},"Yes, anyone else want to come in on that? Rita and then Blake.",[10,378,62],{},[10,380,381],{},"I think Blake was before me.",[10,383,12],{},[10,385,386],{},"I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.",[10,388,21],{},[10,390,391],{},"I just wanted to say I really resonate with what Max says that the images put out there about the physical vessel and that kind of spiritual energy, the part that it takes up that fluctuates with the soil, I think. And sometimes when I have felt full, it was being in my hometown, living by the beach, on my birthday, lying in the water, like on my back in the middle of the night.  with bioluminescence floating around me, following my movements, seeing like the radiant scar of the cosmos overhead, this is in New Zealand, and the moon and just feeling like so connected with my inner and outer self, you know, like it all being mixed together. The water, for me, we talk about what is the body, water has a big thing for me, a big connection. Or simultaneously like lying on the beach.  like in the same area, you know, like this place where I feel I belong. My family has been there for like a thousand years. Lying there, feeling the sun on my chest. I've talked to Eric about this before and feeling like, I don't know if anyone's ever felt this, you know, when you're sunbathing and you're slipping between waking and asleep and feeling the heat waves shimmer across your chest. And it feels like, for me, I liken it to my spirit just floating, I'm so full.  that my spirit exceeds my physical body. And it's like, I'm a sailboat and my spirit is like connected at like two points and it's just so full that it's blowing like just above my body. And yeah, that's a moment where my spirit or my joy, my spiritual joy like exceeds the bounds of my physical vessel.",[10,393,12],{},[10,395,396],{},"Rita and then Morrigan.",[10,398,62],{},[10,400,401],{},"I think for me, to connect back to my body would be my breath. When times have been hard, coming back to breath has been really important. And connecting to everyone, thinking every living thing breathes. And that sort of makes me feel connected from being dissociated when I am.  Yeah, I think for me, breath is probably the most important thing that keeps me connected to everyone and everything when I feel detached. That's all I wanted to say.",[10,403,12],{},[10,405,406],{},"I'm Morgan.",[10,408,41],{},[10,410,411],{},"I think I might have misunderstood the question. Something to do with the idea around being connected and disconnected all at the same time, that it's not actually some sort of dialectic that's going on there. And the thing that sprang to my mind was, so as you know, because you were there, the last child I had, I had at home and I delivered her myself.  And that seems like quite an on-your-own sort of thing, but you can't possibly be, because there's another person there, the child. And there were a load of people there as it happened. But I had two really good female friends and we shared a t-shirt. This t-shirt just said celebrate. And what we do is every time one of us dropped one  We'd post the t-shirt. It sounds ridiculous and we'd wear the teeth. So between us, I think we had Ten children right and so we'd put the special t-shirt on and clearly the other person You know the friends the good friend wasn't there but the t-shirt was that sort of thing and I can remember it as a moment of like being both  but I wasn't because someone else was inside my body and outside of my body, but not because the work that I was doing was very bodily. You know, I was in labor having a baby with no pain relief at all. And so there was this kind of space that I was existing in that was, it was like...  It was like pure sound with no sound, if that makes sense. It was a non-physical, extremely physical space. And we had asked someone to come around and take some pictures, but it was so quick that they didn't make it in time. But they were walking down the road and it was late summer. And I think we had the door open. And they said from the end of the street, they could hear.",[10,413,414],{},"the most amazing noise that I was making, that I didn't even know I was making, but apparently there was this most amazing noise. And it just sort of filled the air, but I didn't give a shit. Because that was a moment, you know what I mean? I didn't have to explain it to anyone, I didn't have to rationalize it, I didn't have to anything. It was interior and exterior all at once.  And so that is, for me, that would be a moment of being disembodied, embodied and pure joy, all at the same time.",[10,416,12],{},[10,418,419],{},"Eric",[10,421,103],{},[10,423,424],{},"For about 10 years I tried to learn to dance, because I remembered going on political marches where I couldn't toy toy. I was always out of sync, it was very embarrassing. And I never became particularly good at dancing. But there was something about in the West you count steps, one, two, three, four, but in  African dance is about the phraseology, it's about the ancestors dance through you in its purest form. But it's also something about when you become part of a collective body as well, like on a protest, when the police are standing and you see the people toituing and it's very intoxicating. I suppose the western equivalent would be people going to a football match.",[10,426,427],{},"But there was also a sense in which through the dance the endeavor was to try to reclaim a culture I was excluded from and an African culture, a sense of wanting to belong to a sense of Africa, a sense of becoming Africa in a sense but always out of reach but trying to become through this dance.",[10,429,430],{},"The other sense of, and what I wanted to express with that was the sense wasn't so much the dances when it's, I think in the West, there's a particular, historically there was a privilege in of written discourse, but if you start with oral history and you start with rituals and ancestry, where it's communicated in a very bodily and a very different way.  where it's not so atomized, but you exist in relation to a community. Your body is not this atomized thing. Your body memory exists in relation to others and takes up a position in relation to others. And sorry, I'm going on a bit, but the other point I want to make is the other sense of exhilaration of the body is when my body ceases to exist. And for me, that has often been in, for example, in boxing or karate when you fight him.  There's nothing quite as alive in my experience for me when you're there and it's just you and the other person and they're inflicting pain and you're inflicting pain while you're trying your skills. But there's a moment in which you're absolutely, it's almost like you cease to exist to some extent. And it's like in those moments, Eric ceases to exist and yet you don't use pure body.",[10,432,12],{},[10,434,435],{},"Yumna, would you like to come in?",[10,437,86],{},[10,439,440],{},"Um, yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence, Eric, that you couldn't toy toy. Toy toy is like, um, it's like a dance, I suppose. Um, like you say, Eric, your ancestors couldn't move through you because they didn't exist. So it's not something that can be taught, is it? Um, and I, yeah, I'm seeing that again, like when I'm watching the protests around the world, um, for Palestine.  In Washington DC, the protest of 300,000 people was led by a group of Native American fancy dancers. It's called fancy dancing, you know, where they wear the lights and the feathers and the mirrors, and they have this... it somehow does always come down to the feet and the feet's attachment and interaction with the earth. And I mean, I saw some Maori protesters in New Zealand doing the haka.  at some protests and then I saw someone fuse them all together with the Palestinian Dabkeh dance, which again is a lot of stomping your foot on the ground. And it also makes me think about, you know, what Blake and Eric were saying about the sort of containment of like where you're located to be part of something and the land back movement, which is the scariest thing.  to the white supremacist colonial imperialist movement is the land back movement. And if we manage to get the land back for Palestinians, there's a chance that every indigenous group could get their land back at some point.",[10,442,12],{},[10,444,445],{},"Yum, that has just frozen. It's okay.",[10,447,86],{},[10,449,450],{},"Sorry?",[10,452,12],{},[10,454,455],{},"I'll give her a moment to unfreeze.",[10,457,86],{},[10,459,460],{},"Oh, frozen.",[10,462,103],{},[10,464,465],{},"You froze, Jomad, and if you can hear this, you froze, so we're waiting for you to unfreeze.",[10,467,86],{},[10,469,470],{},"Yeah, can you hear me and see me now or am I still frozen?",[10,472,12],{},[10,474,475],{},"Yumna, you froze a little bit in the last minute or so of what you were saying there. If you're able to sort of rephrase it, say it again, that would be lovely. But if not, that's also fine.",[10,477,86],{},[10,479,480],{},"Can you hear me now and see me?",[10,482,12],{},[10,484,485],{},"Yes, we can see you now, you're fine.",[10,487,86],{},[10,489,490],{},"Okay, yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, the geography of bodies and how to locate our belonging does sometimes come to the land back movement and some of us are not privy to that. Like, I consider myself not entitled to land in South Africa or in India. So I'm one of the people that is pro land back, even though even though obviously I wouldn't get any of it, which is which makes my belonging to the collective, you know, less tangible.  And in terms of white supremacy, I think that was kind of the plan. You know, it's none of the CISCO incidental. And I think Eric would be the same. Eric is just going to not really be entitled to land in South Africa. He's not going to be able to dance with his feet stomping on the land in a in a spiritual way, the same way that our black countrymen could. And that's something that some of us have to accept, because also knowing where to locate our belonging and our body in us and our  embodiment and our collective participation also means acknowledging spaces that we cannot penetrate.",[10,492,12],{},[10,494,495],{},"Okay, thank you. I'm going to tell you, I mean, an anecdote, I suppose. So I'm obviously 55, not obviously, but I am old. And so my body has been reorganized to numerous times at various points in my life for various reasons, in sometimes more and sometimes less physical ways. But recently.  well, recently, in the last decade, the main reorganisation I did with my body was learning to ride a motorbike, which had certain other reasons behind it, but was just something my kids were older and I could do. And one of the things that was fascinating about doing this was the transport through the series of processes that the body engages in when trying to do something, when trying to learn something. And a lot of that kind of translated into a constant  riding out nowhere just to see how you could get your body to move. And a motorbike, unlike a car, is much more close, much closer to that kind of cyborg relationship we have with a push bike. If you ride a push bike where, you know, there's a very sort of just by moving your body a little bit, the machine moves. But obviously, if you're going, let's say, fast.  That movement is, you know, it's quite intense. The rush is quite intense, but you're constantly learning. And it comes down to really simple things like learning to, we have a, we have a technique called pushing the push down. So you hold, hold tension on a bar as you're going around a corner, sweeping corner at speed, and you hold this tension. You can feel all the way through the bike and you feel it in your, in your foot. And I was watching as, as  people who involve themselves in a culture do. I was watching some motorcyclist on YouTube and he does racing and he had a big accident at CT, which is a lethal race that takes place once a year in Isle of Man. And he had a bit of an accident, lost his leg and was getting back onto the bike. And he was talking very much about this kind of very, very specific, beyond any kind of symbolic relationship, almost, this very specific connection process between his feet.",[10,497,498],{},"and the machine and how going from four points of connection, two toes, two hands, to three points of connection, particularly when he's riding a lot faster than I ever could. I mean, he's riding 160, 170 miles an hour with one leg. It was how crucial, how central the very intimacy of that point of touch, that point of connection, was almost underpinning what was plainly a sense of self.  for the person. He plainly had a sense of self that was connected to this and a symbolic structure that was connected to this and effect and all kinds of things that we can look at as a kind of psyche but underpinning this was this intimacy of a point of the body connecting to a point of the machine in a particular way at a particular angle and I think to me that's what I would encounter as joy in the body. So there's a sort of sense in which joy for me arises at that point.  like sub-representational, sub-symbolic, and the learning process is almost the best way, to learn a new technique with your body is almost the best way to encounter this, to feel your fingers on the fretboard of a guitar or how your arms have to operate if you're playing piano or knitting or sewing or something. These kinds of things I think are under-theorized, under-represented, under-acknowledged in our relationship with our body, perhaps. Eric.  you can come in there and then Blake and then Yumna. OK, and this will probably be the final round and we'll probably be winding up now. So if you have any one second, if you have any final thoughts, bring them in. And when I ask you to stop, please don't close your browser until everything is uploaded, just leave it open for a little bit afterwards. So I'm going to do Eric, Blake and Yumna in that order, if that's OK.",[10,500,103],{},[10,502,503],{},"And",[10,505,506],{},"I would, I would say...",[10,508,509],{},"And I was just thinking of Karl Gibran, your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And I was thinking that there's got to be, from the self-same world that you get your sorrow, you get your joy. I was thinking of this intimate relationship because at some level, I mean, one thing I think that Lacan got right was he spoke about extimacy, the point that you're most alive is also the point which is also external to you.  So these interrelationships between your joy and your sorrow. I don't think it's as clear cut as just these joyful moments of this form and other assemblages. Or it can be, but it's also something about this fine play between these different things.",[10,511,12],{},[10,513,514],{},"Blake.",[10,516,21],{},[10,518,519],{},"Uh, yeah. Um, I just wanted to circle back to some things that Eric and Yumna were talking about in regards to the, um, ability or inability to dance and the kind of ancestral capacity we have for that. Um, yeah. So as I was saying before, my research had been about indigeneity in like a post-colonial and multicultural context. And one of the things I found interesting was, yeah, and bypassing the kind of  and gatekeeping of culture and tradition and what an ideal indigenous person should do was being able to re-root and just access one's identity through that ancestral capacity for indigenous knowledge and philosophy. And Maori philosophy, like I'm sure like a lot of other philosophies have these kind of a few tenants which would be things like guardianship, over our natural.  our vast self, kinship, unity, collective action, hospitality, things like that. And so while that's like an indigenous philosophy, it's like everybody could access their own ancestral capacity through practicing those things. That way you're not appropriating someone else's culture or space, but you do still have a connection to your own.  your own ancestry back to creation. And so I felt like that was just something to bring in as a way for us to have a broader, more collective capacity to relate to one another despite different kind of cultural genealogies.",[10,521,12],{},[10,523,180],{},[10,525,526],{},"Would you want to come in Rita?",[10,528,86],{},[10,530,531],{},"Retail Yumna, which brown lady were you talking about?",[10,533,62],{},[10,535,536],{},"No, I don't. No.",[10,538,86],{},[10,540,541],{},"Sorry Rita, if you want, I've been talking a lot, so if you'd rather talk, it's okay.",[10,543,62],{},[10,545,546],{},"No, no, it's okay, you carry on.",[10,548,86],{},[10,550,551],{},"Are you sure?  Really, go ahead.",[10,553,62],{},[10,555,556],{},"Yeah, yeah.",[10,558,559],{},"No, I was just saying what I was just reflecting on what Blake was saying that sometimes we get so held up in people's ancestry that there is still a connection between all of us and if we could just hold that and it's like all the political side of everything as well that everyone's trying to hold on to sides, but at the end of the day, it's all about humanity and peace and living together, isn't it? And  I think that's really important.",[10,561,562],{},"And I always think of ancestry as we all kind of come from the same at the end. That's the way I think. And if we get too hung up on ancestry, it's not, to me, it's not a great thing.",[10,564,565],{},"Maybe because at the end of the day, I came from a place where it was, where if I go back to my ancestry, it's untouchable. And in a way it's like, I can't touch it. And it gives me a sense of no belonging.",[10,567,568],{},"And in a sense, everybody has a belonging and I feel I don't. So I always try to, what Blake said, about trying to disconnect with people. And that's how I tend to sort of live my life more than that. Sorry, Yumna, you carry on.",[10,570,86],{},[10,572,573],{},"No worries. Yeah, I mean, I think philosophically and politically, we have to acknowledge people's indigeneity and backgrounds and ancestry in terms of reallocating the land, basically, because of our connection to the land, and then also making space in different ways with acknowledgement. Acknowledgement has to be there.  It's such a big part, acknowledgement and memory, because that's what we've been talking about this whole time. What we're carrying in our bodies is land appropriation, is violation, is theft. And without acknowledging those things and just seeing each other as human beings floating about, that's not gonna get us to where we want to be as a collective. I think what we've seen now is witnessing and acknowledgement and how important that is.  to moving forward as a collective. But I mean, that's just my perspective. But what I wanted to say also, what about Eric and Morgan said, in terms of giving birth, I think that that's Morgan's experience is related to what Eric's quote on Hilal Gibran in that, you can't experience real joy unless you experience real pain. And I think that without knowing it myself, I think that's what the act of giving birth.",[10,575,576],{},"gives to certain people. And fuck, I keep forgetting my points. Sorry.  Uh...  I lost the last thought, but thanks, thanks everyone. This has been really interesting.",[10,578,12],{},[10,580,581],{},"Max, would you like to come in? And Rosina, you're there, so maybe you wanna, if you have anything you fancy contributing after Max, then join in. Max.",[10,583,27],{},[10,585,586],{},"Yeah, thanks. I just want to return to the collective body again.",[10,588,589],{},"bit about the joy, sorrow.  complex, I guess. From October 7th, like many of us, I'm sure, my body's been up and down and been experiencing a lot. And I'm politically active. I tend to do a bit of stewarding with",[10,591,592],{},"just remember thinking like, am I going mad? Like, am I going mad? Because the world doesn't seem to be reacting to this situation the way I think they should, and the way that is like clearly obvious to me. But then actually being on that march and, and realising that 100,000 people showed up, it made me feel like, oh, I wasn't going mad. That's like, this is correct. Like people, people are.  people are here because this is correct. And I was really emotional, I was really emotional because the thing that we're all together over is horrific. But there is a relief in being there and seeing that other people are there and seeing that other people are mourning and mourning with them.",[10,594,595],{},"that is joyful in a way. And it's weird to say like I felt great joy at that point, but I did and I'm glad of it and I continue to go through this sort of cycle of feeling desperate and then feeling like joy. And I think that is a really important function of the collective body.",[10,597,86],{},[10,599,600],{},"Sorry, I just remembered what I wanted to say. Is it okay if I just quickly say it?",[10,602,12],{},[10,604,605],{},"Yes, sure. Good. Yeah.",[10,607,86],{},[10,609,610],{},"I mean, it was to Matt's point about, you know, kind of figuring out what our bodies can do and realizing what we can, you know, how our bodies can perform. And I guess for me, now that I'm thinking of it, the happiest is when I'm doing absolutely nothing. I'm not testing my body. I'm not pushing my body. I'm not, you know, I think rest is resistance and doing nothing and getting your body to do nothing like a hibernating bear. There's immense joy in that.",[10,612,21],{},[10,614,615],{},"Matt, I just wanted to add a bit of an addendum just quickly. Um, we've been talking a lot about like, uh, people's placement and appropriation of, of land in that. And I just wanted to like acknowledge a more, uh, non anthropocentric point of view, is that like, so I've been using Maori as an example, um, and so we have a lot of like land claiming stuff going on, but like, I also want to acknowledge that we also colonized a land.  from our non-human family as well. So I think from an environmental perspective, we should consider, it's fine for us to talk about our greater bodies and our outer bodies, but like, oh yeah, I just like to lodge the kind of environmental kind of aspect in that conversation as well.",[10,617,12],{},[10,619,620],{},"And Rosina, would you like to come in?",[10,622,623],{},"Rozina:",[10,625,626],{},"Hi Matt, and this is really nice to see everyone. I'm so sorry for turning up really late. I've been trying to figure out what the question was, Matt, just from people's answers, but could you just ask the question again?",[10,628,12],{},[10,630,631],{},"Kind of, it was like, is there some sort of point I was suggesting at which, you know, you kind of get a sense of joy in your body when we kind of, in the very physicality of it somehow, underneath or beyond or below, yeah, something along those kind of lines. Is that maybe where we find some joy? Something along those lines? Possibly. Any thoughts on that?",[10,633,623],{},[10,635,636],{},"Yeah, I don't know about joy, but if I'm thinking about connect or connectedness to my body, I think it's when I'm in a state of split or disconnect. I was anorexic for about several years when I was a very young teenager. I'm not going to go into the internet, I would if we had more time, but something that I took away from that was through that  deprivation, I had this, I was able to attain this clarity of thought that's always lingered to this day. And for good or bad reason, it remains a crutch for me. Not so much food deprivation now, but a kind of deprivation, you know, be that connecting to my body or touch.  But I'd say through un-linking or uncoupling from myself is when I feel most connected to myself, I think. And you were speaking about motorcycles, Matt. I think that's probably why I enjoy, I derive a lot of joy from driving, but perhaps because of that split between, well, that demarcation between me and the outer world, given this shell around me.  I don't quite feel the same movement you do. What you said made a lot of sense to me with your body's movement and the bike's movement. And I don't get that, but I'd say depersonalization or derealization or dissociation or whatever, whatever the synonyms there are. I'd like to think it's got something going for it.",[10,638,12],{},[10,640,641],{},"I don't think you're on your own there. I think quite a few people maybe have that position. That's the idea. No, but I think it's also, yeah, it's lovely to have everyone here. And thank you. Many thanks for all your thoughts this evening. I'm going to wind it up here. Is there anything anyone would like to say that they feel that's been missed? Eric. Oh.",[10,643,623],{},[10,645,646],{},"I'm sure.",[10,648,103],{},[10,650,651],{},"I'd like to hear what you think, Matt. I'd like to hear what your thoughts are. Yeah, if that's okay.",[10,653,12],{},[10,655,656],{},"Yeah. I think I've mentioned some of it. I mean, as I say, my relationship with the concept of the body has been a very long one, because in philosophy, obviously, there was a huge move in the 80s and 90s to try and reintroduce the body in a discipline that was so radically disembodied, as to be quite strange. And at the time, the kind of  antagonism to Cartesian dualism just made the body seem like the side you were meant to be on. You weren't really meant to be on the side of the mind. You were meant to be on the side of the body and anyone on the side of the mind was a bit of a fool and believed in this dualism. So I was quite for a while enthralled by this relationship to the body, partly through Merle",[10,658,659],{},"and all these kind of things where you have disrupted and all disordered relationships in the body. But the more I work, the more I live, the less I think the body is anything other than a kind of effervescent or side effect of a whole bunch of other things that are actually more interesting. So it's a kind of odd concept because I think, I mean, I agree with you that the best kind of relationship to the body is when we can enable it to move, when it doesn't feel like it's a drag.  when it doesn't feel like it's a weight, when it doesn't feel like it's a bind or when it doesn't feel like it's just a weight or just a bind. And there are moments when we live where the body is just a fucking bind. You know, when you've got toothache, there's very little you can do other than just submit to this hellish thing that causes you pain or, you know.  or lacking touch or lacking, I mean, there's a whole range of things in terms in which the body is just a dead weight. So I try to, I suppose, think less and less about the body, the older and older I get. Maybe that's because I'm getting older. That is also possibly why.",[10,661,662],{},"Okay, lovely. If you leave your web page open, just let it upload. It will tell you when it's finished uploading. It's just a local copy that's kind of buffered on your machine. So I'm going to end the session now and say goodbye to everybody. So you can sort of you can you can leave the room, just leave your web page open. Okay. So thank you very much, everybody, for coming. And as I've said, we'll let you know what we're doing with the work before it all goes out. It won't be soon. It will be sometime early next year.  in the first quarter of next year, I expect. Okay, and obviously if you have any questions in the meantime, ask Eric, Max, you wanted to say something.",[10,664,27],{},[10,666,667],{},"Yeah, I'm not on a webpage, I'm on an app. Does that change what I do here?",[10,669,12],{},[10,671,672],{},"It'll probably just say, leave it open for a moment when you press the leave button. Yeah. Just, just, just watch what it says. Cause it will just say I'm uploading and that's what we're looking for. It'll only take a moment. All right. Thanks very much everybody. See you soon.",[10,674,27],{},[10,676,677],{},"fun.",[10,679,680],{},"Right. Thank you.",[10,682,21],{},[10,684,685],{},"Bye.",{"title":687,"searchDepth":688,"depth":688,"links":689},"",2,[],"Episode 3 of CONVERSATIONS ABOUT CONCEPTS explored the concept of the body. Here","md",{"date":693,"episode":694,"image":695,"tags":696},"2024-02-23",3,"\u002Fimages\u002Fuploads\u002Fimage-7.png",[697,698,699],"body","transcript","podcast",true,"\u002Fblog\u002Ftranscript-body",{"title":5,"description":690},"blog\u002Ftranscript-body","yJg1yM8ZYX8N8_q0M7Oyz7Plf-ngVxnSRpAiJkTUC2c",1777636241049]