Notes on Big Body

Big Body is society, its infrastructure, the habits of mind, and the broad strokes of human action that define its ebb and its flow.

Big Body is merely a concept for all the concrete, rebar, plumbing, wires, and other sundry elements that comprise a functioning society's substantive framework. It is the Big Body for it is both the body, the meat, the substance of societal workings and it is the projection for the individual. As the house is a projective body for the family dwelling within it, Big Body serves as the dwelling space for society.

I came upon this idea in my many drives to and from school. I saw a building that I called the last remaining bit of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project built in St. Louis in the 1960s. That was a failed experiment in housing African Americans. Its residents took advantage of the space, ripping out all that was worth something and scrapping it. The density of the project also led many an enterprising resident to prey upon the more hapless residents. It was demolished after its brief tenure. It was a failed social experiment. The idea came from the stripping of the housing projects infrastructure, its plumbing, for scrap, which gave me the idea for Big Body. Big Body is merely a concept, an idea, a focal point for attending to the ways that people use their body not as labor per se but as product to be sold. People sell blood. People sell eggs. People sell sperm. People sell hair. People sell plasma. And people donate their bodies to science and to medicine for use in others. Science has rendered the body a site for consumption. And so the big buildings also present themselves as bodies to be harvested as well to the enterprising who see not a dwelling but an opportunity to seize.

That's all fine and dandy but to make this idea sing, to make it work conceptually one has to flesh it out analytically. I see Big Body as an evolving work. The past 200 years have seen the city become the focal point for dense dwelling. As such it became the problem of density that must be solved. Waste removal, water, heating, electricity, basic safety, health codes, and the like were ways of solving the problems that come with dense dwelling. So many bodies huddled into orderly spaces is an accomplishment of the modern city. Out of this, Big Body takes shape. As we've entered the 20th century, electricity and the telephone emerge. In its train follow radio and television. The next wave is the Internet and the continual remediation of past forms of communication through digital channels and the many companies seeking to set its standards. Taken as a whole we are witnessing the emergence of a true nervous system for Big Body. The epochal shifts in the evolution of Big Body also focus on shifts in individual relations between the little, personal bodies and our understanding of them plus how our little, personal bodies relate to others. The pathologies of our times perhaps find a connection within the changes and developments of Big Body. This is a work in progress.

I like the idea of Big Body. It has a certain sci-fi flair to it much like Big Brother. Big Body is merely the substance of our relations. The brief past echo and the built future upon which our bodies will interface. The life giving water that we drink passes first through Big Body. Our waste is carted away, distributed, and treated through Big Body. Features of our universal rights as humans, the things taken for granted, are the substance of Big Body as well. Recently, access to the World Wide Web was added to the United Nation's list of basic human rights. That is an outcome of human activity, human retooling, human remediation of Big Body. Most of what we write, see, read, and share pass through the copper cables laid at the beginning of the 20th century and maintained through this century. Big Body is our relation to the most intimate space and the most public space. People eat, shit, drink, sleep, and weep in and upon the surfaces of Big Body. Some prefer to do it behind a door. Others do it among others. How each of us navigates these realms, adds significance or none to them, and how individuals must contend with the uses to which Big Body is put but their little bodies among the constant traffic of humans punctuates psychology and its many pathologies. Paruresis, psychogenic urinary retention, is but one example of how contending with Big Body as a little body crops up. The public excretion avoidant and its opposite, the person who leaves shit in the toilet and on its walls or urinates in inappropriate places comprise the ways that Big Body affords opportunities for pathologies and socially inappropriate behaviors to emerge.

Notes on Big Body run much the way of how technology pundits describe standards and innovation. Big Body is the built environment. Into it we are born. The residue of our time spent among it is left in the names scratched into pavement, spray point on the walls. These isolated vignettes are but one way that the built environment is repurposed. These may provide fodder for the glass half full crowd. For the glass half empty crowd the built environment is a reality with which we must contend. Ultimately, this built environment is a limiting condition for the full and flowering potential of human expression. We see this in the ways that copper wire limits communication. We see this in the ways that our desire for cars congests cities. We see this in the ways our time gets wasted in traffic and in transit to and from locations. We also see this in the ways that telework enables us to avoid this, but also avoid most of the human relations that once punctuated our lives. The litany of pros and cons is not dissimilar to the usual techno-pundits' laundry list. To differentiate Big Body from the pack is to hone in on the interface and the pathologies it produces. Big Body is about finding ways to reconcile individuality with socialilty, to fulfill the needs of individuals both bodily and mentally while fulfilling the basic needs of a functioning and efficient dense-living social organism. The television images of cities from the 1960s through the 1980s plays out in my mind as I try to see Big Body. Koyaanisqatsi comes to mind. There the metaphor of the small, the electronic, the body, and society all came together. Circuit boards and cities find similarities. Traffic and circulatory systems find similarities. Also, the hubris that succeeding in bringing so much human potential together spins out in the end to remind us that no matter how much we can project progress and futurity upon the modern city as a trope we have not left the little fishing village, the little pastoral community behind. The thousands of years we spent following animal herds as opportunistic hunters is the in-built obsolescence of human social behavior that must be relegated to the Id in our Victorian blueprint for modern society. That's it.

Big Body is how past, present, and futurity coalesce in the built and lived-upon framework of society. While one could read this from that art-house flick. Big Body merely puts some academic dressing upon it.

These are my notes upon Big body. More to come I hope.